Wikimedia Services

This page is obsolete. It is being retained for archival purposes. It may document extensions or features that are obsolete and/or no longer supported. Do not rely on any information on this page.

Superseded by the Core Platform Team.

We, the Wikimedia Services team, are aiming to shape the Wikimedia service infrastructure with platform services, APIs and tools. We develop scalable APIs with clearly defined Swagger / OpenAPI specs and versioning policies. We automate monitoring, metric reporting and logging. We keep the majority of services simple & stateless by offering general multi-datacenter storage (RESTBase) and change propagation solutions.

Services and REST API

Team implementing backend services and a REST-style content API as a step towards a service-oriented architecture.

Group:	Technology
Start:	2014-06-01
End:	2018-06-30
Lead:	Marko Obrovac
Management:	Eric Evans, Petr Pchelko

Core Platform Team →

Overall, our goal is to make our infrastructure more flexible, robust and efficient by gradually migrating from a monolithic architecture to micro-services.

Projects edit

Services edit

RESTBase, the storage & API proxy service behind the Wikimedia REST API. Built using Node.js and Cassandra.
EventBus, a Kafka-based event distribution solution for asynchronous tasks & cross-service communication.
ChangeProp, a general change propagation service with support for templated HTTP requests and CDN purging.

Libraries edit

HyperSwitch, a Swagger / OpenAPI spec-based service framework used in RESTBase and ChangeProp.
Service-runner, a node.js cluster based service runner providing standardized facilities for logging, metrics & rate limiting.
limitation, an efficient node.js rate limiter library with a Kademlia DHT backend.

Services owned by other teams edit

Parsoid, providing a bidirectional conversion between wikitext and HTML. This service powers VisualEditor.
Mobile Content Service, a service extracting content and metadata tailored to the needs of our mobile apps.
Citoid, a service converting URLs, DOIs and ISBNs to full citation metadata. This powers the citation tool in VisualEditor.
Mathoid, offering SVG, MathML and PNG renders of mathematical formulae.
Offline Content Generator, rendering PDFs for collections of pages.
Content Translation Service, providing semi-automated content translation between projects.
Analytics Query Service, a HyperSwitch and Cassandra based service powering the pageview API.
ORES, web service that provides machine learning as a service for Wikimedia Projects.

Documentation & resources edit

Services Documentation Portal

Contact the team edit

Contact the team:

services@lists.wikimedia.org mailing list
#wikimedia-services IRC channel