Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-07/From the editors Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-07/Traffic report Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-07/In the media
Bugs, Repairs, and Internal Operational News
February Engineering Report published
(Due to a change in titling, this is in fact the second February update to be published. In future, all reports will cover the events in the month named in the title.) The Foundation's Engineering Report for February was published last week on the Wikimedia Techblog, giving a brief overview of all Foundation-sponsored technical operations in the last month. It summarised the developments:
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The update also noted that a job opening had been posted for a contractor in the Netherlands to support the Operations team in designing and maintaining the Wikimedia network(s), and perform on-site work in the data centre facilities in Haarlem and Amsterdam. The Foundation also noted its intention to hire a "Rich Text Editor Engineer", an indication that the Foundation is serious about its desire to provide its own WYSIWYG in-place functionality, a project for which research has begun (for context, see previous Signpost coverage). This might entail a move away from Wikimedia's traditional revise-and-save model to a more Google Wave-like approach, added developer Trevor Parscal. (On a related note, the report also discussed a new JavaScript parser for wikitext using parsing expression grammar.) In other news, Sumana Harihareswara was hired as a contractor to help out with Google Summer of Code 2011 and the Berlin Developer meeting.
In reference to the new Virginia data centre, the Foundation noted that all that was left was "finishing touches" to the hardware arrangement, as well as the initial setup of the software, "configuration of the first clusters of servers and services" and "network transport and transit services to be installed". In addition, contractor Russell Nelson has installed and deployed Swift on a test cluster of three machines. This forms part of the WMF's intent to improve the media storage architecture; the next steps are "fixing some bugs and doing some preliminary testing". The area of backups and general data redundancy has also seen significant developments: the operations team "have purchased a dedicated storage solution which will arrive in March... Once servers in the new data centre are online, and our private connection between Tampa and Ashburn is up, we will be able to replicate all data between the two data centres as well." Discussing the LiquidThreads project, the report also explained that "documentation on upcoming back-end and architecture changes [and] design specifications have been published".
The Foundation also announced the start of work done on two projects that have traditionally generated a great deal of debate: a system to allow users to censor their own visits to Wikimedia sites, and a mechanism for allowing expert reviews of articles. For the former, the report noted that initial UI design recommendations had been drawn up; on the latter, the report noted that a set of "draft requirements" had been drawn up for an "open review system for Wikipedia, as well as an API and user interface for quality indicators". The report, the Foundation's Engineering update to date, also noted work in a number of other areas not covered in this summary.
Brion Vibber rehired
The WMF's current Chief Technical Officer (CTO), Danese Cooper, has announced the rehiring of former CTO Brion Vibber to the post of Lead Architect. The post will be in the second layer of the current employee hierarchy, and Brion will start on March 31, 2011, she reported (Wikimedia Techblog).
Brion's name will be familiar to many Wikipedia regulars; indeed, in acronym form he gives it to this very report. The author of much of the original code in MediaWiki, and, as Wikimedia's first paid employee, having been among its most involved programmers for a number of years, Brion left the Foundation in 2009. He joined StatusNet, an open source startup focused on microblogging, while remaining active as a Wikimedia volunteer (see previous Signpost coverage). Danese explained Brion's new role:
| “ | Brion's first project will be on the team tasked with re-writing MediaWiki's parser, which should be both a challenging and rewarding effort, to which Brion tells me he's looking forward. | ” |
In a blog post, Vibber outlined this "next-generation parser work" briefly, saying that it will involve separating "weird template edge cases" from those that can be treated more easily.
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.
- An issue where the presence of a large SVG would break any page it was embedded in has now been fixed (bug #27508).
- Two dates have been proposed for the 2011 Berlin developer Meeting in mid- or late May, May 20–22 and May 13–15. A straw poll is being run to decide which should be used.
- Users on mobile devices will now be redirected much more quickly to prevent excessive loading times (bug #27690).
- Developer Mark Hershberger has signalled his intention to ensure that one of last year's GSoC projects, "Reasonably efficient interwiki template transclusion" (see previous Signpost coverage), comes into production (wikitech-l mailing list).
- Users of newer browsers will now be informed that their file exceeds the filesize limit (100MB on Wikimedia wikis) before the upload commences, rather than after it finishes (bug #26217).
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-07/Essay Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-07/Opinion
Foundation looking for "storyteller" and research fellows; new GLAM newsletter; brief news
Foundation's Community Department searching for "storyteller" and summer research fellows
A job opening for a "storyteller" was posted to the Wikimedia Foundation's web site last week, defining the new position as follows: "The movement storyteller will work with members of Wikimedia communities to teach Wikimedia readers about the world behind the content they rely on everyday." Replying to comments on the Foundation-l mailing list, Chief Community Officer Zack Exley clarified that "there is one important purpose of that job that may be a bit hidden in between the lines: For this position, I'm looking for someone who can help free us from dependence on 'The Jimmy Letter' in fundraising", by making the donation appeal letters from other community members more effective. (On the other hand, their banners – the first step in leading a reader to making a donation, with the letter being the second – already "got similar, sometimes slightly better, click rates as the Jimmy banners". Exley said that a detailed analysis of the fundraiser is in the making.)
A new page about Wikimedia Fellowships has been set up on Meta, reflecting recent clarifications (Signpost coverage) about the program, which was started last year and "offers the chance for volunteers from the projects, academics, and industry professionals to work with the Wikimedia Foundation in a new way."
On the official Wikimedia blog, the "first Virtual Community History Fellowship" program was announced, which during the summer will pair graduate students with community members from Wikimedia projects to write historical accounts of these projects (at the moment, focus is on the Tagalog, Italian, Armenian, Belarusian, Polish, Urdu, Hindi, Sanskrit, Cantonese and Chinese Wikipedias).
Two other summer fellowships for quantitative and qualitative research do not appear to have been posted by the WMF in a public venue, but were revealed last week (the deadline was March 7th) on the Wiki-research mailing list by an independent academic who called them "well-paid". One of them was to gather a small team of PhD graduate students from disciplines "involving large scale data analysis", for work on "developing a community analytics platform to gain a better understanding of [the Wikimedia Foundation's] contributors and readers." The qualitative research internships were offered to "PhD candidates or people who have completed Masters degrees in history, other humanities fields, anthropology and other social sciences", whose task will be "to understand better why the active editor base is not replenishing itself at the same rate it used to – and to present data that can help our communities figure out what to do about it".
In other news, the contracts of Community Associates Christine Moellenberndt [1] and James Alexander [2] have been extended.
New edition of GLAM newsletter
The second edition of This Month in GLAM, a newsletter on Wikimedia collaborations with cultural institutions, has been published on the Wikimedia Foundation's Outreach wiki. Among various other items covered previously in the Signpost, it records the following events for February:
- The Museum for Hamburg History have begun a collaboration with Wikipedia and will be donating some 200 images of a house restoration.
- Derby Museum and Art Gallery have begun using QR codes in their exhibits, which link to the relevant article on the English Wikipedia.
Briefly
- New English Wikipedia offline release: Wikipedia:Version 0.8, the latest collection designed for offline release, is now available for download. It contains around 47,300 articles taken from all subject areas in the English Wikipedia, with selection based on importance and quality. It is being used by the Version 1.0 team to test out automated revisionID selection, with software based on WikiTrust. Free downloads of Version 0.8 are available in the form of raw ZIM files, or bundled with Kiwix or Okawix readers (PC/Mac/Linux). A BitTorrent release is also under way, with iPhone/iPad and Android variants made available later this month.
- GLAM-WIKI videos: Video recordings of keynote presentations at the GLAM-WIKI conference held in London in November (Signpost coverage: "British Museum hosts two days of talks between Wikimedia and the cultural sector") have been uploaded to the Internet Archive (links). (Audio recordings with better sound quality have already been available.)
- Is Quora the next Wikipedia?: On his "The Wikipedian" blog, User:WWB tried to answer the question "Is Quora [ a question-and-answer site that has gained prominence in recent months] the Next Wikipedia?" in four postings ("Part I" "Part II: Follow the Leader", "Part III: It’s the Little Differences", "Part IV: If Personnel is Policy, then Userbase is Destiny"). Last month, researcher Seb Paquet had explained "Why Quora is Not Wikipedia" (Signpost coverage).
Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-07/Serendipity Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-07/Op-ed Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-07/In focus
New case opened after interim desysop last week; three pending cases
The Committee opened one new case during the week. Three cases are currently open.
Open cases
Rodhullandemu (Week 1)
This case, which was opened earlier today, will examine the circumstances surrounding the removal of Rodhullandemu (talk · contribs)'s administrative privileges. The Committee revoked the relevant motion that was passed last week (cf. Signpost coverage) and replaced it with another motion: Rodhullandemu's administrator privileges are suspended for the duration of the case. Rodhullandemu indicated that he will not be participating in the proceedings. 18 kilobytes of on-wiki evidence was presented during the day, of which more than 16 kilobytes was submitted by recused arbitrator, Elen of the Roads.
Monty Hall problem (Week 4)
During the week, another 4 kilobytes of content was submitted as on-wiki evidence, while drafter Elen of the Roads submitted additional proposed principles in the workshop.
Kehrli 2 (Week 4)
During the week, another 2 kilobytes of content was submitted in on-wiki evidence, while drafters David Fuchs and PhilKnight submitted several proposed principles in the workshop. Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2011-03-07/Humour