Technology

1. Foundation

   Node 6 at Wikimedia: Stability and substantial memory savings

   

   Node 6 has delivered on stability and performance, setting a new benchmark for future releases. When combined with our shared library infrastructure and deployment processes, we are in a good spot with our Node platform: it lets our engineers focus on delivering reliable features for users and minimizes time spent on unexpected issues.... Read more

2. Community

   Algorithms and insults: Scaling up our understanding of harassment on Wikipedia

   

   A research collaboration with the technology incubator Jigsaw is helping us better understand and explore technical solutions to harassment on Wikipedia.... Read more

3. Technology

   Pre-university students contribute to Wikimedia in Google Code-in 2016

   

   From November 2016 to January 2017, 192 students worked on 424 Wikimedia tasks with the help of 46 Wikimedia community mentors.... Read more

4. Foundation

   Hiring a data scientist

   

   We recently needed to backfill a data analyst position at the Wikimedia Foundation. If you’ve hired for this type of position in the past, you know that this is no easy task. Based on our successful hiring process, we’d like to share what we learned, and how we drew on existing resources to synthesize a better approach to interviewing and hiring a new member of our team.... Read more

5. Technology

   Importing JSON into Hadoop via Kafka

   

   Our three key players are Hadoop, the defacto distributed batch data processing platform; JSON, a ubiquitous data format; and Kafka, which is becoming the system of choice for transporting streams of data. However, much of the data that flows into Kafka is in JSON format, and there isn’t good community support around importing JSON data from Kafka into Hadoop. This article summarizes some comm... Read more

6. Foundation

   Wikimedia Foundation receives $3 million grant from Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to make freely licensed images accessible and reusable across the web

   

   The funding will support Wikimedia community efforts to enable structured data on Wikimedia Commons, the free media repository with more than 35 million media files.... Read more

7. Community

   Wikipedia Zero joins Mossab Banat on his trip to freely share human knowledge

   

   Banat has made over a hundred thousand edits and helped expand the Arabic Wikipedia while using zero-rate mobile data.... Read more

8. Technology

   Introducing Montage, the web platform used to help judge the world’s largest photo competition

   

   Imagine, for a moment, what it takes to organize a competition with a quarter of a million contestants participating in over 40 different national campaigns around the world. How do you build tools for this unconventional process while still keeping it flexible and open for organizers to decide how to run their competitions? This year, the international team of Wiki Loves Monuments (WLM) organizer... Read more

9. Community

   Wikipedia will talk to you: Wikispeech

   

   The development of Wikispeech, a new MediaWiki extension, has started, and by 2017 Wikipedia should be able to talk to you. The project will bring together existing language resources and develop a functioning text-to-speech solution for Swedish, English and Arabic.... Read more

10. Foundation

    Brand-new template support for the content translation tool

    

    Content Translation is getting a major new feature: completely re-written support for templates, making it easier to translate templates across languages.... Read more