Talk:Wikimedia Engineering/2013-14 Goals

SecurePoll
Please include in the schedule a rewrite and redocumentation of the SecurePoll extension. The extension does not take advantage of many of the improvements in MediaWiki that have occurred over the last several years, and its documentation is incomplete and out of date and does not reflect feature changes that have been incorporated over time. Risker (talk) 22:10, 6 June 2013 (UTC)

"Dozens of Toolserver tools have moved to Labs"
Uh? Tools supposed to be moved are over 540, so "dozens" is a non-goal, unless of course you plan to keep Toolserver alive long after the deadline for this initial testing goal. --Nemo 10:19, 30 June 2013 (UTC)

Gadgets 2.0, Global scripts
Can we have Gadgets 2.0 and/or global scripts among the goals this time? See: Helder 17:19, 9 July 2013 (UTC)
 * Thread:Talk:ResourceLoader/Version 2 Design Specification/Is... this thing still on?
 * [Wikidata-l] Wikimedia-related code & test repository
 * Requests for comment/Global bits and pieces

"Wikimedia depends on a ton of other FLOSS projects…We have no good list of what all those projects are"
Apparently nobody is aware of FLOSS-Exchange, Open Source Toolset, or the tangentially related Best practices in evaluating new software. -MZMcBride, 20:43, 12 July 2013


 * I'm sure Erik is, as he proposed & created the first (IIRC). :) Its purpose is to share best practices though, not to document whatever we use to facilitate wishlists, so I'm not sure it's also a "good" list for that purpose; this aspect is however covered by Bug management/Upstream bugtrackers, a very nice page Andre has been compiling for a while.
 * Adding more pages like these would be harmful and most upstream issues are best filed by the devs encountering them in their work (as they normally do), but when we have useful information to share it's nice to be more proactive upstream about issues which are sadly invalid on our bugzilla. GIMP seems a very bad example though (basically impossible to reach all wikimedians using it and even harder to make sense out of it; negligible userbase compared to GIMP's even all combined). --Nemo 07:30, 13 July 2013 (UTC)

Editor engagement goals
I just now read Wikimedia Engineering/2013-14 Goals and must say it has an ambitious goal. We've had a declining editor base for many long years and it might be unrealistic to turn that around in such a short time. Many things are not under the control of the team such as, the community's general hostility toward newcomers, the number of newcomer edits reverted and articles deleted, etc. These things have a significant impact on retention of new editors and are outside of the team's ability to control. Of course, this is only one person's opinion, but it's enough of a concern that I thought I'd raise the issue. 64.40.54.75 05:14, 2 September 2013 (UTC)
 * 2.4k is just a fraction of our current 75-80k active editors per month. True, WMF engineering usually has a negligible effect on that metric so far, but for comparison Wiki Loves Monuments 2012 increased it by about 7k in September. --Nemo 09:18, 2 September 2013 (UTC)