Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-03-18/Technology report

February engineering report published
The WMF's engineering report for February was published this week on the Wikimedia blog and on the MediaWiki wiki ("friendly" summary version), giving an overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in that month (as well as brief coverage of progress on Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata project and the now Wikimedia CH-led Kiwix offline reader project). Of the seven headlines picked out for the report, five had already received some sort of Signpost coverage. The other two highlight the achievement of the Wikipedia mobile site in now serving some 3 billion page views a month, as well as improvements to jQuery.IME, a JavaScript internationalisation plugin intended not only to be of use to Wikimedia wikis but also to the web more broadly.

Progress on the Foundation's larger projects was steady during February, the report noted, with the VisualEditor "on schedule" for a July rollout. It was a similar story for Parsoid, the new parser that underpins the VisualEditor, which received various performance improvements and version 5 of the Article Feedback tool (the debate over its future notwithstanding). The Echo (notifications) project also continued apace with incremental extensions throughout February. The mobile team worked on mobile image uploads (now available on all wikis) as well as a dedicated Wikimedia Commons app, currently in beta mode (Google Play; iOS version), while the continuing boom in page traffic was made clear by the installation of 120 new application servers, intended to give the WMF enough capacity for another year, the report said.

The monthly engineering reports also provide a useful roundup of personnel changes at the Foundation. As has been the general trend over many years, the number of new staff outnumbered the number leaving: joining in February were Ed Sanders (Software Engineer, Visual Editor); Christian Aistleitner (contractor, Gerrit); Marc-Andre Pelletier (contractor, Wikimedia Labs and tool migration; better know by his pseudonym User:Coren); Kirsten Menger-Anderson (part-time Technical Writer, focussing on thus-far internal documentation relating to Editor Engagement Experiments) and Greg Grossmeier (Release Manager). Leaving was senior developer Patrick Reilly, just one month after his promotion to the position of Site Performance Engineer and Senior Technical Advisor and two years after first joining the WMF. At least 14 positions were still unfilled at time of writing.

In brief
Not all fixes may have gone live to WMF sites at the time of writing; some may not be scheduled to go live for several weeks.
 * Pick of the blogs: Valerie Juarez, currently interning with the WMF as part of the broader Outreach Program for Women (OPW), picks up on some of the critiques of the Wikimedia and MediaWiki bug tracking processes in a series of blog posts published this week ("How to create a good first bug report"; detailed traffic flow diagram). Wikipedia Zero was also in the news as it won an SXSW Activism award (Wikipedia blog) and signed up a new partner, Axiata, expanding Wikipedia provision in Southeast Asia.