Major news in June include:

• the Berlin hackathon, the largest gathering of Wikimedia technologists to-date, co-organized with Wikimedia Deutschland;
• the June milestone release of the Visual Editor and Parsoid to mediawiki.org;
• the mobile team kicking off app development for Wiki Loves Monuments
• the launch of IPv6 support for all Wikimedia projects.

Events

Recent events

Berlin hackathon (1–3 June 2012, Berlin, Germany)

Approximately 104 participants from 30 countries came to Berlin, including MediaWiki developers, Toolserver users, systems administrators, bot writers and maintainers, Gadget creators, and other Wikimedia technologists. The community also learned more about the Wikidata and RENDER projects. More updates, links to videos, and followups are on the talk page.

Upcoming events

Pre-Wikimania hackathon (10–11 July 2012, Washington, D.C., USA)

Open source teaching nonprofit OpenHatch will be aiding in organizing and running this two-day event, with Katie Filbert, Gregory Varnum, and Sumana Harihareswara. Experienced Wikimedia technologists will collaborate on their own projects, while interested new developers will be able to learn introductory MediaWiki development. Accessibility will be one of the event themes. The event is free to attend even for those not attending Wikimania itself.

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Major news in May include:

• the publication of the Architecture of Open-Source Applications book, which contains a chapter on MediaWiki;
• initial designs for a universal language selector;
• a new and easier way to view a wiki’s interwiki map;
• 1 million files uploaded with our UploadWizard;
• the Wikidata/RENDER summit in Berlin, followed by the hackathon.

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Major news in April include:

• Substantial work on Wikimedia engineering’s goals for the next fiscal year;
• The selection of 9 Google Summer of Code students and the start of their work;
• The shift to a rapid deployment cycle;
• A new mobile skin deployed to Wikimedia sites;
• The Wikipedia mobile app for iOS switching to using OpenStreetMap data. (more…)

Major news in March include:

• The completion of the move of all our domain names from registrar GoDaddy;
• The publication of a report on the first phase of Article Feedback version 5;
• Design improvements to our mobile front-end, available in our beta;
• The first release of a complete copy of the English Wikipedia as ZIM file, for offline reading using Kiwix;
• The move from Subversion to git as our primary code versioning system;
• The kick-off of Wikimedia’s participation to Google Summer of Code 2012.

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Major news in February includes:

• The difficult deployment of our Swift infrastructure to serve image thumbnails
• Continued success for our Wikipedia Android app
• The deployment of MediaWiki 1.19 to all Wikimedia sites except for most Wikipedia languages
• Continued preparation for our move from Subversion to git

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Major news in January include:

• Tech support for the black-out protesting SOPA & PIPA;
• The successful San Francisco hackathon;
• The release of the official Wikipedia Android app;
• A new beta cluster for Wikimedians to test upcoming software before it’s deployed to production.

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Major news in December include:

• The deployment of WebFonts to select Indic wikis;
• The first developer prototype of the Visual editor;
• A new version of Article Feedback being tested on the English Wikipedia;
• Progress on the Swift media storage project.

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Major news in November include:

• The completion of the Coding challenge, and two coding events in India and the UK;
• Continued infrastructure work in our data centers to improve performance and reliability, and on the Labs project;
• Progress on the Visual editor and its back-end;
• New versions of the Feedback Dashboard and the Upload Wizard, bringing new and long-awaited features;
• Fundraising engineering going full-swing, in parallel with the annual fundraising campaign;
• The final release of MediaWiki 1.18.0.

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Major news in October include:

• The New Orleans hackathon, which focused on Wikimedia’s infrastructure;
• Native HTTPS support on all Wikimedia sites;
• Progress on the Visual editor project, with the first prototype expected in the coming months;
• The deployment of the Translate extension to meta-wiki;
• The deployment of MediaWiki 1.18 to all Wikimedia sites;
• The completion of the first revision of the MediaWiki architecture document;
• The ramp-up by the fundraising engineering team, to prepare for the upcoming annual fundraiser.

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Major news in September include:

• The deployment of protocol-relative URLs, paving the way for native HTTPS;
• Major progress by our new Internationalization & localization team;
• The deployment of our new mobile front-end, now the default mobile experience;
• The start of the deployment of MediaWiki 1.18 to Wikimedia sites;
• The completion of the Google Summer of Code project;
• Ongoing preparation for the upcoming coding events in the USA, the UK, India and online;
• A revamped, and now maintained, roadmap for Wikimedia engineering efforts.

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