The Signpost

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

November Engineering Update published

The Foundation's November Engineering Update was this week published to the Wikimedia Techblog, and gives a brief overview of all technical operations in the last month. Developer Rob Lanphier (User:RobLa) gave an executive summary of the month:

The number of unreviewed revisions of the MediaWiki software fell in the last month as more developers became involved in review.

Additionally, a number of items had had their statuses updated since last month. For example, the Foundation noted that the establishment of the new Virginia data centre (originally planned to be online by January 1, 2011) had been delayed temporarily, but was happy with work done to the donation-handling infrastructure. In addition, the Foundation announced that it was "on track to deploy a new version of Pending Changes on November 16" and the release of the new Resource Loader was nearing, but that development of LiquidThreads had slowed due to lack of available personnel.

Likewise, regarding the new media upload wizard, the Tech team said that Neil Kandalgaonkar had finished development of a temporary storage system for media files that are missing required metadata like licensing or source information, and that Roan Kattouw has started the prep-work for deployment of this feature, scheduled for late November. Other developments included the news that developer Ryan Lane had started actively investigating OpenStack for open-source testing and that the Foundation were pleased with making some headway in code review (note the drop in unreviewed revisions of the MediaWiki software shown to the right of the chart), after allocating more resources to the task (see Signpost coverage: "More developers to review code"). In addition, the success of the Hack-a-Ton (cf. Signpost coverage) was noted, as was an intention to revamp Wikimedia's mobile sites.

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 many weeks.

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