MediaWiki Product Insights/Reports/August 2023

Hello All,

Following up from conversations at the Wikimedia Hackathon in May, I’d like to give an update on how we’re approaching the work around MediaWiki and what to expect in the upcoming months!

Since the beginning of July, the Foundation has dedicated MediaWiki product leadership and a new MediaWiki engineering group. We’re in the process of onboarding (i.e. team processes, scope and operational questions, getting familiar with the domain), have been spreading out to help with specific projects as consultants and/or code contributors and are now kicking off broader research to inform a strategy for MediaWiki. This email is the first edition of a monthly email report to wikitech-l and mediawiki-l. Reports can also be found on this page.

Goals
The first 12 months are about building out the foundations for the following years:
 * Building up the new MW Engineering group and MW Product function
 * Developing a strategy for MediaWiki - by June 30th, 2024 (Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan, WE3)
 * Reaching a 20% increase of authors to selected MediaWiki repositories deployed in Wikimedia production - by June 30th, 2024 (WE3.2)
 * Investing in developer experiences and reduce fragmentation of developer workflows (WE 3.1) - continuous work with specific deliverables in 2023/24
 * Exploring and resolving a set of questions around stewardship and Open Source strategy (goes beyond MediaWiki) (WE3.3)

The approach that we’re trying to take is to work problem-focused (start from the problem, usage and needs), data driven (conduct research to inform decisions), step by step (prioritise and scope things, since we can’t address all questions at once), and take people along (share regularly about the work, initiate exchange and invite people in).

Research pillars and timeline
The research to inform this work consists of multiple pillars and phases:
 * MediaWiki within Wikimedia’s ecosystem: Key challenges and opportunities. Includes interviews and review of existing write-ups (pre-kick off at the Hackathon in May, continue in July)
 * MediaWiki usage and development beyond Wikimedia: Synergy effects, opportunities and challenges (start in November)
 * Components-workflow mapping exercise. How are core workflows such as edit or patrol powered and enabled by MW core components, extensions, modules, gadgets, tools as of today? Initial focus is on prototyping this for 1-2 Wikipedias and potentially Wikidata (start in September)
 * Exploration of MW platform designs - what changes could we make to increase the sustainability of the platform, better serve our core workflows and needs and provide easier, faster and cohesive paths to feature development? (October-June)
 * Ways to establish effective and responsible stewardship for the platform (October-June)

MediaWiki within Wikimedia’s ecosystem: Interviews
A key part of research is talking to folks. We’ve kicked this off with first interviews with MediaWiki developers at the Hackathon in May, have surveyed ourselves (= MediaWiki Engineering group) and plan to conduct more interviews with a cross-section of people over the next 6 weeks. The main focus of this round is on MediaWiki within Wikimedia’s ecosystem and we’ll be reaching out to a few more MediaWiki volunteer developers starting this week. We’re planning to organize broader MediaWiki ecosystem conversations in the upcoming quarters.

Project snapshot: Onboarding via Code Mob
As we’re building up the new MediaWiki engineering group, we’re also investing in onboarding team members to MediaWiki development and MediaWiki APIs who are just getting started. Bill Pirkle has come up with an onboarding curriculum and is hosting twice-weekly “Code Mob” sessions for folks on the teams across MW Engineering - if you’re interested in “learning along”, you can find a list of recordings and topics on this page.

Reporting and documentation
We will share about our work through the monthly emails and in 3-4 MediaWiki Product Insights reports published throughout the Foundations’ fiscal year (July-June). Over the next weeks, we will also create or update team pages and clean up + create Phabricator workboards to make it easier to follow along (and for us to keep track/focus :-).

Your ideas, support, patience as we are settling in, experiences and insights in challenges and opportunities really matter for this to work out. A big thanks to all the folks who already have offered support, shared their experiences, or otherwise helped out so far! <3

If you have specific questions or thoughts on this edition, this talk page is a good place to connect :-)

Thanks all for reading!

--BMueller (WMF) (talk) 20:45, 22 August 2023 (UTC)