The new software is a ssh-agent proxy that allows a group of trusted users to share an SSH identity without exposing the contents of that identity’s private key.... Read more
Technology
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Announcing Keyholder: Secure, shared shell access
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Get live updates to Wikimedia projects with EventStreams
Our new public service that exposes live streams of Wikimedia projects is already powering several visualizations, like DataWaltz.... Read more
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Helping you find that needle in the haystack: Building Wikipedia’s search functions
On a daily basis, millions of terms are entered into the Wikipedia search engine. What comes back when people search for those terms is largely due to the work of the Wikimedia Foundation’s Discovery team.... Read more
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Wizards, Muggles and Wikidata: The Room of Requirement for structured knowledge
As Wikidata compiles structured knowledge about the world, it needs contributors from all backgrounds, wizards and muggles alike.... Read more
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How a feminist stood up to trolls and measurably changed Wikipedia’s coverage of women scientists
Did the efforts of Emily Temple-Wood (“Keilana”) and other editors really make a difference in Wikipedia’s coverage of women scientists—especially given the vast expanse of an encyclopedia that has 5.4 million articles in English alone? The answer, one year after the headlines, is an unequivocal yes.... Read more
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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
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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
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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
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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
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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
