Wikimedia Technical Conference/2018/Session notes/Product Vision WMF/WMDE

https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T206063

Some slides have speaker notes embedded, so this doc's notes are just a light transcription of any tangents, plus any Q&A.

Toby:
 * Welcome and thanks to organizers
 * We'll be digging into Themes after lunch. Please talk to the people in charge of each theme.
 * [Slides and presentation]
 * TODO: Add speaker notes into Toby's presentation. He will provide text to Nick

Lydia:
 * [Slides and presentation]
 * We have many similar projects with shared traits, but some distinct and unique requirements for specific areas.
 * Want to talk about what the common traits are amongst the family
 * We need to decide where to stop trying to fit distinct products into the framework of collaborative encyclopedia software. How does knowledge as a service changes the DNA of our projects
 * We've been putting a lot of effort into making Wikibase more usable outside our projects. Firmly believe it can immensely useful outside our ecosystem.  Should be easy to install for third parties and be more integrated into all Wikimedia projects. It brings so many benefits to preventing duplicated efforts in knowledge curation.

Cindy:


 * [no slides]
 * MediaWiki as core platform for Wikimedia and as third-party software
 * Why do we support third party use?
 * One of our key principles is FLOSS. Many 3rd parties have used MediaWiki for a wide variety of innovative reasons.
 * Opens new paths through the software, surfaces issues
 * Brings in additional people who find bugs and contribute fixes and new ideas.
 * Creating entirely new features, from visualizing data, authenticting enterprise systems, determining who is watchlisting pages, and so many more.
 * I’m not happy with the “third party” terminology, trying to come up with a better term.  (“Non-Wikimedia MediaWiki users”?)
 * There are opportunities for us in the foundation to make better use of wikis and to support the use cases of enterprise extensions.  Plenty of knowledge creation functionality is not used in our projects but still deserves our support.
 * E.g. SNPedia: collects snippets of genetic info,
 * E.g. DIY wikis for makers
 * E.g. Gamepedia farm (22m monthly unique users, 315m monthly pageviews)
 * E.g. government uses, from City of Vienna to NASA (who use a number of internal wikis to support the ISS)
 * E.g. General wikifarms
 * E.g. Semantic MediaWiki
 * E.g. Hallo Welt! Building the BlueSpice distribution