Wikimedia Technology/Goals/2018-19 Q2

Q1

Wikimedia Technology Goals, FY2018–19, Q2 (October - December)

Q3

Introduction

The Technology Department has a number of annual goals in support of the Wikimedia Foundation's Annual Plan; this work is detailed in the Annual Plan. Our remaining work falls into four broad areas—foundational, sustaining, supporting our technical community, and supporting the overall community health.

All Technology programs fall under the primary goal of Knowledge as a Service/Foundational Strength - evolve our systems and structures, except for TEC5: Scoring Platform and TEC9: Address Knowledge Gaps which fall under the primary goal of Knowledge Equity - grow new contributors and content.

Purpose of this document

Goals for the Wikimedia Technology department, for the second quarter of fiscal year 2018–19 (October - December 2018). The goal owner in each section is the person responsible for coordinating completion of the section, in partnership with the team(s) and relevant stakeholders.

Goals for the Audiences department are available on their own page

Legend

ETA (Estimated Time of Arrival) fields may use the acronym EOQ (End of Quarter) or EOY (End of Year).

Status fields can use the following templates: To do, In progress, Blocked, N Postponed, N Stalled, Partially done, or  Done

Technology Departmental programs

TEC1: Reliability, Performance, and Maintenance

Goal Owners: Mark Bergsma; Ian Marlier; Nuria Ruiz; Bryan Davis

Q2 Goals are Partially done

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2 by team:

Analytics

• Continue upgrading to Debian Stretch  Done
• Order and configure hardware for dbstore1002's replacement  Done
• Add prometheus metrics for varnishkafka task T196066 In progress
• Working on a strategy and scripts for updating superset (http://superset.wikimedia.org) task T211706 In progress

SRE

• Refresh hardware and perform necessary maintenance - will be  Done by end of December

SRE / Traffic

• ATS production-ready as a backend cache layer will be  Done by end of December
• Migrate most standard public TLS certificates to CertCentral issuance  Done
• Increase Network Capacity Partially done, will be completed in Q3 due to ongoing fundraising efforts

RelEng

• Determine the procedure and requirements for an automated MediaWiki branch cut  Done

Performance

• Train feature developers on the use of performance metrics to detect and address regressions In progress
• Deliver high-traffic images as WebP  Done
• Improve Navigation Timing data, by moving it from Graphite to Prometheus Partially done
• Expand mobile testing In progress
• Expand outreach and engagement to wider Performance community In progress
• Test the effect of MediaWiki commits In progress
• Ongoing maintenance of components owned by Performance is always In progress; for this quarter's work, we're  Done
• Anonymized data publishing is N Stalled and deferred to Q3
• Research performance perception in order to identify specific metrics that influence user behavior  Done with follow-up in Q3

WMCS

• Continue replacing Trusty with Debian Jessie/Stretch in infrastructure layer In progress and will continue in Q3
• Communicate Trusty deprecation to Cloud VPS community  Done
• Develop Trusty deprecation plan for Toolforge  Done and communicate that timeline to community Partially done
• Track progress towards full removal of Trusty from Cloud VPS In progress, will continue in Q3
• Migrate 50% of Cloud VPS projects to the eqiad1 region and its Neutron SDN layer  Done, will continue in Q3

TEC2: Modern Event Platform

Goal Owner: Nuria Ruiz

Q2 Goals are  Done

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Development of intake service for events whose transport is JSONSchema/http  Done

TEC3: Deployment Pipeline

Goal Owner: Greg Grossmeier

Q2 Goals are Partially done

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Formalize the collection of CI infrastructure and tooling metrics is Partially done will continue in Q3 to expose the interface metrics
• Develop set of metrics to assess incident reports/post mortems is  Done, will probably do follow-up work in Q3
• Adopt more services into Deployment pipeline - migrate graphoid to the Deployment pipeline is N Postponed as Graphoid is now recommended for stewardship review, zotero v2 is  Done
• Deploy blubberoid  Done
• Reprise the work on the logging infrastructure In progress and will continue in Q3

TEC4: PHP7 Migration

Goal Owners: Mark Bergsma and Ian Marlier

Q2 Goals are  Done

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Ability to serve a % of production traffic from PHP7 are mostly  Done with final code reviews In progress
• Sampling profiler for PHP7 has been identified and is prepared for use in the WMF production environment  Done
• Identify and address code issues and opportunities under PHP 7.2  Done

TEC5: Scoring Platform

Goal Owner: Aaron Halfaker

Q2 Goals are  Done

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Upgrade Celery  Done
• Fix logging for logstash  Done
• Implement edit quality models for translatewiki   Partially done and will wrap up by end of December
• Document Feature Injection in The ORES Manual  Done
• Blog announcement of Undisclosed Paid Editors dataset  Done
• Resubmit ORES paper to the Journal of Computing N Cancelled
• JADE --> Production Partially done to be finished up in Q3

TEC6 Address Infrastructure Gaps

Goal Owner: Mark Bergsma

Q2 Goals are Partially done

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Begin the implementation of Q1's Logging Infrastructure design is mostly complete and will be  Done by end of December
• Expand modern metrics infrastructure coverage is mostly complete and will be  Done by end of December
• Design and prepare infrastructure for database binary backups is In progress and will continue in Q3
• Test Performance implications of MySQL TLS connectivity N Stalled on DBA technology selection/implementation due to other work requirements that have higher priorities
• Start migrating watchlist last-view updates is N Stalled due to emergent work and other higher priority work, we hope to get it done in early Q3
• Expand Spicerack library and SRE Cookbooks conversion is Partially done and will continue into Q3
• Expand Netbox usage  Done with stretch goals to be done in Q3

TEC7: Environmental Sustainability

Goal Owner: Erika Bjune

Q2 Goals are Partially done

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Identify and contract with an organization that can assess WMF's environmental footprint is  Done
• Work on an actionable plan for reducing WMF's environmental footprint is now In progress and will be on-going for ~6 months.

TEC8: Search Platform

Goal Owner: Erika Bjune

Q2 Goals are Partially done

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Find and hire a contractor to help with NLP work  Done
• Begin working on one internal NLP project Partially done
• Improve autocomplete of Wikidata items Partially done and will continue in Q3
• Prototype a feature that is based on collected data Partially done and will continue in Q3
• Finish up the Korean morphological library analysis and get ready for deploy into production when ES6 is completed  Done
• General language support is always In progress
• Search for licenses in Commons is N Stalled as we await further instructions from SDoC program
• Split the search clusters to increase stability  Done
• Continue replacing ElasticSearch servers (end of life maintenance)  Done
• Separate the Wikidata ElasticSearch implementation into a separate extension Partially done and will continue in Q3
• Migrate ElasticSearch cluster restart scripts as cookbooks using Spicerack In progress as more testing is needed
• Performance and bug fixes for WDQS is always In progress
• Service Level Objective (SLO) work for WDQS is In progress and will continue in Q3
• Investigate Blazegraph support options and alternatives  Done

TEC9: Address Knowledge Gaps

Goal Owner: Leila Zia

Q2 Goals are Partially done

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Iterate on and improve the report of the state of the art on bias detection and algorithm audibility is N Postponed
• Build a section recommender system based on the section mapping algorithm is Partially done and will be finished by end of December
• Build a test API for the section recommendation algorithm is N Postponed until Q3
• Improve article recommendation API to completion (of the second stage improvements) is Partially done and will be finished by end of December
• Expand the taxonomy of Wikipedia readers is  Done
• Preparing the infrastructure for conducting the survey is Partially done and will be finished by end of December
• Devise the framework for matching newcomers to improve the first design of the framework Partially done and will be continued in Q3
• Develop and test a new experiment plan for testing the quality of the algorithm to elicit user interests  Done
• Finalize the documentation for the research on characterizing Wikipedia readers  Done
• A series of presentations about the results on characterizing Wikipedia readers  Done

TEC10: Build Technical Community

Goal Owner: Bryan Davis

Q2 Goals are Partially done

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Plan and visibly improve Toolforge technical documentation is Partially done and will continue in Q3
• Survey Wikimedia Foundation staff to gauge interest and support for reviving Tech Talks is  Done
• Develop plan for Tech Talks reboot is In progress and will continue in Q3
• Update visual design and content of MediaWiki.org Main Page will be Partially done by end of January 2019
• Support Outreachy Round 17  Done
• Support Google Code-In 2018  Done
• Review and improve top viewed overview pages of the Action API  Done
• Submit a proposal for the Wiki Research Workshop  Done

TEC11: Support Fundraising Activities

Goal Owner: Erika Bjune

Q2 Goals are Partially done

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Support Advancement in all Q2 activities Partially done and will continue in Q3

TEC12: Developer Productivity

Goal Owner: Greg Grossmeier

Q2 Goals are Partially done

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• The Annual Developer Productivity Survey results are synthesized and shared, creating a first year baseline is Partially done and will continue in Q3 to get additional feedback

TEC13: Code Health

Goal Owner: Greg Grossmeier

Q2 Goals are In progress

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Update/refresh review queue is Partially done and will continue in Q3
• 5 of the 15 prioritized repositories have at least 1 end-to-end test is In progress as the team talks with stakeholders
• Assess Platform unit test practices and define improvement plan is In progress and will continue in Q3
• Core Platform and Search Platform teams are using TDM PoC In progress and will continue in Q3
• Identify key Tech Debt areas and add a process for management In progress and will continue in Q3
• Metrics defined and deployed for all 4 Code Health areas Partially done

TEC14: Smart Tools for Better Data

Goal Owner: Nuria Ruiz

Q2 Goals are Partially done

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Create report for "articles with most contributors" in Wikistats2 To do
• Create report for Active editor metrics per project family To do
• Provide easier mapping between Wikistats1 metrics and Wikistats2 metrics To do
• Provide ability to query metrics per project family in Wikistats2  Done
• Add per family unique devices to analytics query service  Done
• Automatic ingestion from eventlogging data into turnilo datasets that area available for easy exploration  Done
• Automation of data sanitization for eventlogging schemas in the hadoop backend  Done
• Presto cluster online and infrastructure accessible by Cloud (labs) users  Done
• Edit Data Lake Quality - resolve known issues (ongoing) In progress
• POC More efficient Bot filtering on pageview data  Done
• Productionize MediaWiki content processing, ngest and process XML dumps  Done

Cross-departmental programs

Segment 2 - Security

Goal Owner: John Bennett

Q2 Goals are In progress

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Review and mature our security policies and awareness functions is  Done but the phishing campaign is N Stalled to be completed in Q3
• Testing campaigns:
  • CSP changes are now  Done
  • 1st round of pen testing (on en wikipedia) is  Done
  • OIT assessment is N Cancelled, might be picked up in 2019.
  • NIST CSF assessment is N Stalled, should be picked up again in early 2019.
  • Initial discussion is In progress to include Phan into MW core and should be completed by end of December.
• Finalize and test our Incident Response documentation is In progress and will continue in Q3

Segment 3 - Analytics

Goal Owner: NRuiz (WMF)

Wrap-up for Q2:

• More restrictive Firewall rules for Kafka. task T204957 N Postponed
• Review the requirements for a service implementing a stronger user authentication scheme for the Analytics Hadoop cluster and possibly for other related tools (like Zookeeper).  Done
• STRETCH GOAL: implement a prototype in labs that the Analytics team can test and evaluate. task T198227  Done

Segment 7 - Core Platform

Goal Owner: Corey Floyd (WMF)

Q2 Goals are In progress

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Define and implement a session management service  Done

Segment 8 - Core Platform (WMDE)

Goal Owner: Corey Floyd (WMF)

Q2 Goals are In progress

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Wikimedia Technical Conference: participate and analyze session output is  Done and will be published soon

Segment 1 - Research

Goal Owner: Dario Taraborelli

Q2 Goals are < In progress

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Design a machine learning framework to identify why statements need a citation in English Wikipedia  Done
• Submit a paper summarizing the modeling work for unsourced statement detection  Done
• Run the second round of data collection to understand Wikipedia citation usage  Done
• Prepare the data and analyze the data collected in the second round  Done
• Perform first round of survey data collection of reader citation usage on English Wikipedia  Done
• Analyze first round survey data of reader citation usage In progress and will continue in Q3
• Host WikiCite 2018 event  Done

Segment 2 - Search Platform

Goal Owner: Erika Bjune

Q2 Goals are In progress

Detailed status here.

Wrap-up for Q2:

• Allow search by type of license N Stalled until Q3