The Signpost

Technology report

Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News

May engineering report published

In May 2012:
  • 77[updated 1] unique committers contributed code to MediaWiki (down 12 from April).
  • The total number of unreviewed commits hit 250 (up 110)
  • About 34 shell requests were processed (no change).
  • 108 developers got developer access to Git and Wikimedia Labs (up 45).
  • Wikimedia Labs now hosts 97 projects (up 16), 177 instances (up 39) and 431 users (up 126).

Engineering metrics, Wikimedia blog

The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for May 2012 was published this week on the Wikimedia Techblog and on the MediaWiki wiki, 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). Two of the headlines for the month have already received coverage in previous issues of the Signpost (work on a new universal language selector and a Wikidata/RENDER summit followed by a hackathon, both hosted in Berlin). Other headlines selected for the report comprised the publication of the second volume of Architecture of Open-Source Applications, which contains a chapter on MediaWiki; a new and easier way to view a wiki's interwiki map (Wikimedia blog); and the surpassing of the one million milestone for images uploaded using Wikimedia Commons' Upload Wizard, which was first deployed in December 2010 (see previous Signpost coverage).

Elsewhere, the roundup contained details of a new Wiki Loves monuments mobile app; the conversion of the final aspects of the other Wikimedia apps that used screenscraping to instead get their data from the MediaWiki API; and the rapid upgrade and renewal of the Foundation's oldest servers (many of which were over four years old). Readers who recall the WMF's assurance in early February to undertake a full review of Gerrit three months after the Git switchover will also appreciate the inclusion of the news that Brion Vibber has agreed to lead that review, publishing his conclusions in early August. The report also noted that the outgoing bugmeister Mark Hershberger has completed a guide for triaging new bugs to allow volunteers to understand and more frequently contribute to the process.

On the negative side, code review was a significant issue in May, with the number of "unreviewed" commits nearly doubling to 250. The figure – although muddied by methodological problems – is already pushing on the target code review limits, less than three months after the Git switchover when it was approximately at zero.

Corrections:

  1. ^ Originally reported as 41, later revised upwards.

In brief

Signpost poll
Tech events (corrected)
The above is a corrected version of the chart displayed in last week's issue. You can still give your opinion on: Which of these best sums up your view about the move to Git and Gerrit? if you haven't done so already

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.

At the time of writing, 17 BRFAs are active. As usual, community input is encouraged. If you have your own idea for an automated task, why not add it to the bot request page? Many bots help keep our wiki together running around and doing those little edits that would be far too tedious to do manually.

















Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-06-18/Technology_report