In December, the team working on VisualEditor introduced a new design for the front-end system that VisualEditor uses, improved several existing features, and fixed over 80 tasks, bugs and requests.

The new design of the interface is based on the future path set by the Wikimedia User Experience team, and is intended to gel with designs across Wikimedia's tools and services and the wider direction of travel for the Web as a whole. The interface is subject to revision and improvements, and nothing is set in stone; feedback is appreciated from users and designers alike.

We also made a number of improvements to language editing and browser stability, progress on providing a new auto-filled citations tool, and improvements to the link editing and media searching tools, all of which will be coming in the near future.

The deployed version of the code was updated three times in the regular release cycle (1.25-wmf11, 1.25-wmf12 and 1.25-wmf13).

In December, the Editing team continued their work on the front-end standardisation project and VisualEditor, both of which are reported separately. The team landed a key new function in the ResourceLoader library used inside MediaWiki core, which converts icons for use in the interface automatically based on browser capabilities and language. The team also provided the OOjs UI library inside MediaWiki vendor for the first time. The TemplateData extension now uses OOjs UI rather than jQuery UI, and has been completely re-written. The team made a number of improvements to the forthcoming citoid service, including support for PMIDs. The team also supported a number of other teams, with some work on each of the MoodBar, GlobalBlocking, ContentTranslation,  MobileFrontend, LastModified, and UrlShortener projects.

In December, we finished work supporting templates that generate attributes of a table as well as content of the table and do not fit well within the DOM-based model that Parsoid works with. Besides that, we improved error reporting when handling images that lets clients like Flow and VE handle them better. With a view to reducing the HTML size that needs to be loaded and parsed by clients, we stripped the private data-parsoid attribute from templated content since it is unnecessary. We also continued with code cleanup and pay back technical debt. Specifically, we did a bunch of fixes in our nowiki handling when HTML is serialized to wikitext. We improved robustness, correctness, and reduced the number of scenarios where nowikis are needed for quotes. We also made it simpler to detect nowiki scenarios for other wikitext constructs and specifically applied it to links of all flavors.

In December, the Collaboration team completed work on the first iteration of Flow's Table of Contents feature, for release in early January. Catalan Wikipedia now uses Flow on their new Village Pump/Technical page, and we're working on feature requests that will get Flow ready for further rollout on both Catalan and French WP.

In December we wound down the search project after successfully deploying CirrusSearch to enwiki. We fixed a few bugs and did some work on preventing very complex queries from putting undue load on the servers. We don't plan to do any work on this project in January.

In December we picked a backend for the query engine. Unfortunately in early February that choice became less good when its primary developers were snapped up by another company and they said they'll have "less time" to work on it. Sad. We've reopened the investigation for backends.

Special:GlobalRenameRequest and Special:GlobalRenameQueue have tested and out are ready for production, Special:GlobalUserMerge continues to be problematic and buggy. An upstream HHVM bug that showed up in late December has caused us to turn off Special:MergeAccount, a vital function to getting unattached accounts to globalize. This is a blocker bug until it gets fixed (estimated late January).

Work on integrating XHProf as the preferred method of profiling an individual request has largely been completed. Ori Livneh has also built a parallel infrastructure for use on the Wikimedia Foundation servers that profiles HHVM using a extension named Xenon. The flame graph output of the Xenon based reporting can be seen at performance.wikimedia.org and the scripts that power it are available on GitHub.

Documentation on the addition of external libraries to MediaWiki core is underway. An RFC on guildelines for extracting, publishing and managing libraries has also been drafted and will be under discussion by the MediaWiki developer community. A blog post describing the accomplishments and next steps for the continuation of the project is being drafted as well and is expected to be published in January 2015.

Antoine Musso and Timo Tijhof are finalizing a standard practice for testing Composer managed projects using CDB as a test bed for refining the techniques.

Structured logging implementation is continuing with the use of Monolog and Redis transport being tested in the beta cluster and a subset of the production Wikimedia Foundation cluster. A new Monolog handler was written and upstreamed to Monolog to support the use case of randomly sampled log event streams. Chris Steipp also contributed a security related patch to Monolog based on a security review he did for deployment on the Wikimedia Foundation cluster.

The project's "top priority" status expires with the end of the fiscal year quarter, but organic contributions and a raised awareness of the functionality offered by library extraction and integration of high quality third party code is expected to continue. A list of future projects has been started and Bryan Davis and others who have participated in the project have high hopes for the transformative changes that this project has unblocked in MediaWiki.

MediaWiki 1.24.1 was released, fixing issues in core and several extensions. Reviews for kafkatee and plancake email parser were finished. During December, the WMF also participated in a security assessment of MediaWiki by iSec Partners, sponsored by the Open Technology Fund. The results will be made public in February.

In December 2014, the team fully migrated its tasks and workflow to Phabricator.

Active maintenance was performed on Media Viewer and CommonsMetadata, which have both seen several minor improvements. The long tail of small bugs affecting Media Viewer in particular was a source of several Google Code-in tasks, which several volunteers tackled.

UploadWizard has been the continued focus of major code cleanup and test coverage increase efforts. Bugs were fixed along the way as well.

Thumbnail chaining was deployed for a short period of time and subsequently undeployed following concerns about over-sharpening it caused. Investigations regarding the performance improvements or lack thereof introduced by thumbnail prerendering at uploaded time and thumbnail chaining were conducted. The discussion and further research are happening on our mailing list.

Significant work has gone into creating an extension to support Sentry, a tool designed to log javascript errors. This effort should benefit the entire organization and give engineering visibility on the live client-side errors encountered by users. In our team's case, it is being worked on in order to identify client-side errors that might be happening in UploadWizard and which wouldn't have been the subject of bug reports yet.

For more information about our work, join the multimedia mailing list.

Numerous Security related tags were added. After the migration from Bugzilla to Phabricator, many projects got created or renamed. "Blocked-on-team" projects were created as requested by Scrum teams. The MediaWiki-extensions-MWSearch and Wikimedia-lucene-search-2 projects were archived. The Future-Release milestone was removed and several other milestones archived. "Technical debt" was turned into a tag, superseding a tracking task. The MediaWiki-JavaScript project and the javascript tracking task were superseded by a generic JavaScript tag.

On December 18, Wikimedia's RT instance was migrated to Phabricator (except for the access-requests@ and procurement@ queues). RT users were added to Phabricator's WMF-NDA group. The Sprint extension was deployed, allowing teams to visualize progress. Best practices for Project management, working with workboards, working with the upstream Phabricator team, and our Phabricator Security setup were documented. The Language Engineering, Multimedia and Analytics teams started migrating to Phabricator. The Legalpad application was enabled and configured. A maintenance window for updating our instance was defined.

FOSS Outreach Program for Women/Round 9 interns started working on their projects and reporting on a weekly basis:

• Neta Livneh: Wikipedia article translation metrics weekly reports.
• Roxana Necula: Wikipedia article translation metrics weekly reports.
• Priyanka Jayaswal: Pywikibot: Compat to core migration weekly reports.
• Anke Nowottne: Wikipedia Education Program need-finding research weekly reports.
• Ankita Shukla: Collaborative spelling dictionary building tool weekly reports.
• Manpreet Kaur: Extending PyWikiBot support to sites on IWM weekly reports.

Christy Okpo's project "Improving the Wikimedia Performance Portal" had a delayed start due to a last minute problem finding a mentor available. She finally started working in a metrics project for Parsoid (weekly reports).

Wikimedia's participation in Google Code-in 2014 during December evolved as planned, with the participation of several students and mentors.

In October we had a successful week long MediaWiki Core offsite in San Diego. Currently we are focusing most of our energy on planning for the MediaWiki Developer Summit 2015 (Jan 26/27, 2015). We are also ramping up slowly on the French Hackathon in Lyon which will be taking place on May 23 - 25. Team offsides come up in January: Ops (1 day offsite), Team Practices (3 day offsite).