Running the servers is only a fraction of the technical and community work that the Wikimedia Foundation’s Technology department does every day. Here’s who we are, along with a few snapshots of our work.... Read more
Technology
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“We keep the servers going … and much more”: Recent highlights from our Technology department
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Designing for offline on Android
We’ve introduced a number of improvements to the Android app in order to better serve these app users who have restricted or low-bandwidth access to the internet. ... Read more
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A new platform to explore statistics about Wikimedia projects
Meet Wikistats 2, a new public dashboard and dataset for metrics related to how people read and contribute to Wikimedia projects. ... Read more
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Seven translation tools you can use to work in multiple languages across Wikimedia projects
Wikipedia is available in hundreds of languages, which is both a gift and a curse—the latter because so much of our knowledge is locked behind language barriers for too many people. Here are the tools Wikimedia has, to help translators bring the sum of all knowledge to their own communities.... Read more
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Gnomes and trolls and hobgoblins (oh my!)—Failed queries and the vicarious fear of missing out
Many experienced Wikipedians have hit on the same clever idea to help less sophisticated users more easily find what they are looking for: take note of what they failed to find and leave a trail of breadcrumbs for the next newbie who comes along. But is there actually anything there? (Hint: Read about Betteridge’s law.)... Read more
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The journey to Thumbor, part 3: Development and deployment strategy
Thumbor is an open source software service focused on resizing media into thumbnail images. Contributors upload full-size original media to Wikimedia projects, and those files need to be resized in order to keep their size reasonable for readers when included in articles. MediaWiki is capable of performing the same resizing tasks, but using Thumbor for the Wikimedia production environment is benef... Read more
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The journey to Thumbor, part 2: Thumbnailing architecture
Thumbor is an open source software service focused on resizing media into thumbnail images. Contributors upload full-size original media to Wikimedia projects, and those files need to be resized in order to keep their size reasonable for readers when included in articles. MediaWiki is capable of performing the same resizing tasks, but using Thumbor for the Wikimedia production environment is benef... Read more
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The journey to Thumbor, part 1: Rationale
Thumbor is an open source software service focused on resizing media into thumbnail images. Contributors upload full-size original media to Wikimedia projects, and those files need to be resized in order to keep their size reasonable for readers when included in articles. MediaWiki is capable of performing the same resizing tasks, but using Thumbor for the Wikimedia production environment is benef... Read more
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Think twice, code once: How Wikimedia shares common functionality across different projects
An overview of a recent cross-team effort at Wikimedia to reuse code on a variety of different platforms and the continuing story of lazy loading... Read more
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The world’s most popular audio file format arrives at Wikimedia
Wikimedia Commons now supports the newly patent-free MP3 file format; when uploaded there, they can be used across Wikipedia and all other Wikimedia projects.... Read more
