Wikidata nears first deployment and wikis go down in fibre cut calamity

The Wikimedia Foundation's engineering report for July 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). All three headline items in the report have already been covered in the Signpost: Wikimania and the pre-Wikimania hackathon; the launch of new software to power a refreshed Wikimedia report card (named in the report as Limn); and the ongoing deployment of version 5 of the Article Feedback tool.

Among other developments noted in the report was work on what is now being called the "Page Curation" project, a package including Special:NewPagesFeed and an opt-in "curation toolbar" that recreates much of Twinkle's functionality as well as a number of other mechanisms for helping editors deal with page creations. In July, the report says, developers "completed development of all key curation tools and are now adding a couple final features ... [and] now plan to pre-release Page Creation on the English Wikipedia in mid-August — with a full release in September 2012". Elsewhere, the first Wikipedia Engineering Meetup was set for August 15. Held in the Wikimedia Foundation's home city of San Francisco, the meetups are an attempt to engage local programmers, of which there are many. The meetups are due to be held every two months, the report noted.

There was also mixed news with regard to site performance (see also related stories below). Performance Engineer Asher Feldman hit gold with an upgraded version of the parser cache server cutting the 90th percentile response time from 53.6ms to 7.17ms, and the 99th percentile response time from 185.3ms to 17.1ms, meaning that 99% of all page requests going through the cache are now served and sent back to the user in 17 thousandths of a second or less. Lead Platform Architect Tim Starling had less success, however, with his project investigating the possibility of optimising PHP processing at the bytecode level, which "looked like a promising direction for performance optimization". Unfortunately, despite a significant "theoretical gain ... actual performance [seemed] disappointing", causing the project to be suspended indefinitely.

Developers are closing in on a first deployment of Wikidata, it became clear this week. Phase one of the project, aiming to provide a central repository of interwiki links, is expected to launch on the Hungarian Wikipedia within weeks (wikitech-l mailing list).

Confirming that all major work on the project, which is split across four extensions, is complete, the past week and the next couple will be dominated by work getting code reviewed, Project Director Denny Vrandečić suggested in his post on the developers' mailing list, picking out seven actionable items that will need to be negotiated ahead of a first deployment.

After the Hungarian Wikipedia, where community members have already agreed to trial the extension, the extension is likely to be deployed to either the Italian Wikipedia or the Hebrew Wikipedia, where its right-to-left support can be scrutinised; next up will be the English Wikipedia and finally all other Wikipedias. Deployment of phase 2 with centralised infobox-style data is not expected until the end of the year, if not earlier next.

Signpost poll

Geonotices

You can now give your opinion on next week's poll: Would you consider installing a Signpost Android app?

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.

• More questions over Wikimedia availability: This week saw two separate issues affect the availability of Wikimedia wikis. The first, on August 2 and provisionally blamed on a bad configuration file update, saw readers receive a plain 502 Bad Gateway error for approximately 10 minutes (wikitech-l mailing list). A second issue, which saw a sharp downwards spike in traffic lasting over an hour on August 6, caused two and a half hours of disruption for readers around the globe. That issue has been attributed to at least one fibre-optic cable being damaged at the WMF's Tampa site. The Foundation maintains two such cables, which link Tampa to its counterpart in Ashburn, Virginia; why the second cable (the very raison d'être of which is to take over whenever the primary cable is unavailable) could not be rotated into operation almost immediately is not yet known, reports Director of Technical Operations CT Woo on the Wikimedia blog. Any downtime is potentially embarrassing for the Wikimedia Operations team; as Woo pointed out last week in a Signpost interview, Wikipedia had only been down for 150 minutes in the whole of the preceding twelve months.
• MediaWiki 1.20wmf9 begins deployment cycle: 1.20wmf9 – the ninth release to Wikimedia wikis from the 1.20 branch – was deployed to its first wikis on August 6 and will be deployed to all wikis by August 15. The release incorporates approximately two hundred changes to the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia, comprising 120 "core" changes plus a similar number of patches for WMF-deployed extensions. Among the changes (the product of a fortnight of development time) are fixes to Special:Categories (bug #25095); an expansion to {{PAGESINCATEGORY}}, allowing filtering to just subcategories, pages or files (bug #14237); and a fix that allows communities to set their own default block expiry time (bug #32178).
• New Gerrit colours live: Code review system Gerrit has received a facelift, courtesy of Git guru and WMF developer Chad Horohoe (wikitech-l). Subtle blue and white replace bright green and yellow; but it may not be enough to win unanimous support for Gerrit during its current period of review (due to end on August 10). That review seems to be inextricably heading in the direction of keeping Gerrit, with a serious challenge not yet found and the promise of substantial customisation (going much beyond a simple colour change) being influential factors for review chief Brion Vibber (also wikitech-l).
• TimedMediaHandler nears deployment: The TimedMediaHandler extension is being prepared for its first deployment to a Wikimedia wiki (wikitech-l). The extension, which overhauls MediaWiki's video handling support, adding such features as arbitrary start and end times and subtitle support, will be deployed to a full test wiki (test2wiki) imminently. The extension is also notable for its length of development time, now at over two years (precursors longer) and including work by contractors, staff developers and volunteers, many of whom will soon be breathing a sigh of relief to see it in widespread use for the first time.
• Srikanth Lakshmanan joins internationalisation engineering team: Chennai-based developer Srikanth Lakshmanan (also known by his pseudonym User:Logicwiki) has joined the Wikimedia Foundation as both an outreach coordinator and a QA engineering contractor. Becoming, in effect, the technical liaison for the WMF's internationalisation team, Srikanth will be "actively reaching out and working with our language communities to get feedback on new i18n/L10n features being planned or rolled out to Wikimedia sites". At the beginning of the month, the Foundation was still actively advertising some 15 open positions spread across almost all its teams.
• Wiki Loves Monuments app into beta testing: A mobile app in support of the international Wiki Loves Monuments competition has entered its beta testing phase (wikitech-l). The app, developed in-house by Wikimedia Foundation developers, "enables mobile monument discovery and photo uploads for the first time" and is intended to help boost the number of photos uploaded during this year's competition. Also under active volunteer development is a Signpost app for the Android platform.
• Four bots approved: 4 BRFAs were recently approved for use on the English Wikipedia:
  • DarafshBot's 3rd BRfA, adding, removing and modifying interwiki links;
  • Legobot's 14th and Legobot's 16th BRfA, creating/modifying redirects related to digraphs & trigraphs and moving pages per RM;
  • OKBot's 6th BRfA, creating redirects from website addresses.

At the time of writing, 13 BRFAs are active. As usual, community input is encouraged.

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You'd think that, after all of these years and the supposed technological bias of Wikipedia contributors, we'd have an encyclopaedia around here somewhere that explained backhoe fade a.k.a. backhoe fading, including such things as warning label conventions that are supposed to mitigate it and explaining that despite the name it is taken quite seriously given that it's responsible for a significant fraction (a 1993 study said three-fifths) of physical layer outages in cable networks, wouldn't you? ☺ Uncle G (talk) 17:39, 7 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• post scriptum: The telecommunications-savvy reader might like to gaze in blank astonishment at the deletion log for backhoe fade. Uncle G (talk) 17:56, 7 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

Clarification on the major outage: Apparently we were supposed to be allocated bandwidth on two different fiber-optic cables from the Tampa data center. The data center, however, erroneously put our 2 bandwidth allotments on the same cable, so when the cable was cut, we had no redundant connection between Tampa and Virginia to fall back to. Kaldari (talk) 22:32, 8 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Which inspires the question, why is there a countepart center in Virginia, if it is not able to take up the load when something goes wrong with the Tampa center or its cables? Do the wikis only work when both centers are alive, ticking properly, and properly connected together? Jim.henderson (talk) 09:53, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
• At the moment, Ashburn only works when both datacenters are connected together. The database masters all live in Tampa and the apaches need to talk to them in order to serve content. LeslieCarr (talk) 18:20, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I suppose the old saying about a backup that doesn't get tested is no back up at all, rings true. Bawolff (talk) 19:26, 10 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]

• Will editors be forced to use Vector when the Curator is implemented? --Orange Mike | Talk 16:28, 9 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
  • I highly doubt it. (If someone made a special page style feature dependant on what skin people were using, I imagine hissy fits would be thrown). Bawolff (talk) 19:26, 10 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]
    • The curation toolbar works in Monobook. Indeed, we wasted spent numerous hours making sure it would work in both skins. Kaldari (talk) 22:58, 12 August 2012 (UTC)[reply]