Wikimedia Product

This page reflects the work done by the Wikimedia Product group. Wikimedia Product staff employed by the Wikimedia Foundation build, improve and maintain the features of Wikimedia sites.

Product Audiences

 * Discovery - Maps, Search, Wikidata Query Service
 * Editing - Collaboration, Multimedia, Languages, Parsing, VisualEditor
 * Fundraising Tech
 * Reading - Community Tech, Mobile Apps, Desktop & Mobile Web, Reading Infrastructure
 * Team Practices Group

Annual Roadmap

 * Annual Plan for Product 2016-2017
 * 2015 Product & Technology Review

Across Product
Draft goals for the Product teams is set for December 3rd. As always we post our draft goals a month prior to the upcoming quarter so community feedback and dependency planning occurs between respective teams.

Product Development
There are a few current efforts underway to help solve some long standing challenges around product.
 * A high level product development process is open in draft for discussion and includes work with the Technical Collaboration team on a Technical Collaboration Guideline.
 * Design and Development Principles
 * Product Development Personas (Draft)
 * Data and research information for features and the product audiences.
 * New Readers ongoing research that focuses on understanding potential Wikimedia readers in countries where access to the internet is quickly growing.

2016 Community Wishlist Survey
2016 Community Wishlist Survey has moved to the voting stage. Voting begins November 28th and goes through December 12th. 325 proposals were provided by 356 editors. Results will be posted on December 15th.

Monthly CREDIT Showcase
Members of our community, Reading, Editing, Discovery and Technology teams show off new work and experiments.
 * Most Recent Showcase: November 2, 2016 (YouTube)
 * Past showcases

Discovery
We build the anonymous path of discovery to a trusted and relevant source of knowledge.
 * Discovery Page: Discovery
 * Discovery Lead: Katie Horn
 * Phabricator task board: #discovery
 * Discovery Projects: Maps, Search, Wikidata Query Service

Recent Highlights
A workshop on advanced search syntax on Wikipedia was held in Germany. The team also added a draft how to guides for using maps, maplink, mapframe and maptemplate as well as the terms of use landing page for the Maps project. The Analysis team completed a task for looking at WDQS traffic data to find parallel connection patterns. Portal language by articles were updated on Nov 22 to note that dewiki is now over 2 million articles.
 * See Discovery/Status updates for the archive of past Discovery updates

Goals
Fiscal Year 2016-2017
 * Q1: July - September (WMF Q1 Review)
 * Q2: October - December
 * Q3: January - March
 * Q4: April - June

Editing
We build collaborative, inclusive tools for creating and editing free knowledge.
 * Editing page: Editing
 * Editing head: Trevor Parscal
 * Phabricator task boards: #Editing; #Collaboration-Team-Current, #ContentTranslation-Release8, Multimedia, #Parsoid, #VisualEditor
 * Editing teams: Collaboration, Multimedia, Languages, Parsing, VisualEditor
 * Editing code coverage: Collaboration, Languages, VisualEditor

Recent Highlights
We're working on several improvements for better support of media in Parsoid. Our initial work on image galleries is now complete and ready for deployment. It is being reviewed by the VisualEditor team and might require additional fixes before being enabled for use inside VE. For video and audio files, the specification agreed but work is currently paused. Also the Parsoid team has started working to finish up and provide to editors the output of the GSoC "linter" project to spot wikitext mistakes and issues for editors to fix. This should help improve the quality of the wikitext corpus and reduce errors for users. Database and Security reviews are complete and additional work is ongoing to ready this for deployment next quarter (Q3 2016-17).

Goals
Fiscal Year 2016-2017
 * Q1: July–September (WMF Q1 Review)
 * Q2: October–December
 * Q3: January–March
 * Q4: April–June

Fundraising Tech
Technical work supporting the Wikimedia Foundation's fundraising efforts.
 * Fundraising Tech Page: Fundraising tech
 * Fundraising Tech Lead: Katie Horn
 * Phabricator task board: #wmf-fr

Recent Highlights

 * We are fielding some issues as payment processors "freak out" before black friday. If any other processors have issues they take top priority over all else.
 * Queue work is pretty much done!
 * We are experiencing a lot of failmail. We are trying to calm it down before big english
 * Central Notice has multiple critical bugs. We are making progress. We may need to escalate our cross team bugs. We will alert manager as needed.
 * We are also focusing many small bugs and tool improvements for CIvi CRM and are in close coordination wit stakeholders.

Goals
Fiscal Year 2016-2017
 * Q1: July - September
 * Q2: October - December
 * Q3: January - March
 * Q4: April - June

Reading
We build exceptional learning and reading experiences for the sum of all knowledge.
 * Reading Page: Reading
 * Reading Lead: Toby Negrin
 * Phabricator task board: #reading
 * Reading Projects: Community Tech, Mobile Apps, Desktop & Mobile Web, Reading Infrastructure
 * Reading code coverage

Recent Highlights
A fresh update for the Wikipedia app for iOS (version v5.3.1) is now up on the App Store.

This version includes fixes for App start crashes and hangs, notifications being sent more than once and stability of saving/un-saving articles. It also includes a fix contributed by volunteer stevenschobert allowing users to use much longer passwords and password managers. Thanks!!!

Additionally, this version includes the ability for us to add announcement cards to users Explore feed. Also coming soon to Android, this allows us to communicate more directly with our app users. The first announcement is running now, and asks users to tell us why they use the app. This is modeled on the reader motivation study conducted on web, and will help inform our priorities for future versions. Special thanks to Leila from Research, as well as the Android and Services teams for helping us launch this.

Goals
Fiscal Year 2016-2017
 * Q1: July - September (WMF Q1 Review)
 * Q2: October - December
 * Q3: January - March
 * Q4: April - June

Team Practices Group
The Team Practices Group (TPG) supports the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) teams in their continual improvement.
 * Page: Team Practices Group
 * Lead: Kristen Lans
 * Phabricator task board: #Team-Practices

Recent Highlights

 * Continuing to work with Darian and Byron on the SIEM project, including consulting on project management strategies, helping set up Phabricator workflows, and helping w/evaluation process for security solution.
 * Working with New Readers: helping the team work on program management "log frame” - supporting development of log frame for group - helping with dependency planning
 * fr-tech is priority for December, watching for fires, impediments
 * Call for outcomes for Structured Data retrospective went out, potential participants identified
 * Annual Planning department collaborations and dependency planning - identifying structure and activities
 * Community feedback period on Design Statement of Purpose closed; Design representatives are working on final statement!
 * Clarified purpose of weekly Design meeting (moving towards critique focus)
 * Conducted final Editing offsite retro with core planning team from Editing/TPG - adding lessons learned to Offsite Planning Guide: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T152057
 * Supported and facilitated the development of a "deployment checklist" for Discovery interactive team (responded to community CL, PM checklist fits user needs, talked to Legal, Design signoff) (Kevin)
 * Continue synthesizing Values conversations for next step of process

Other:
 * Ongoing embedded work with 7 Product and Technology teams

Goals
Fiscal Year 2016-2017
 * Q1: July - September
 * Q2: October - December
 * Q3: January - March
 * Q4: April - June

Wikidata
Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. This project is maintained by the Software Development & Engineering department at Wikimedia Deutschland
 * Page: Wikidata
 * Discussion List: wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org
 * Lead: Lydia Pintscher
 * Phabricator bugs & tasks board: #wikidata

Recent Highlights
Wikidata workshop at Code for Germany with OKLabs, Jens and WikidataFacts. You can read a blog post by Riedelwerk (in German). Benjamin Good wrote a piece on How Wikidata could be used for biomedical knowledge. This weeks query example: Bridges named after women. Newest WikiProjects: Politicians in France. In development Special:EntityUsage and Special:PagesWithBadges now are using OOjs UI (phab:T152046). A RFC discussion on ways to allow visitors to choose a language without logging in (phab:T149419 and phab:T114662). We're participating in this year's Google Code-In with a couple of Wikidata related tasks.

Goals
Fiscal Year 2015 (Fiscal year for WMDE is a Calendar Year model) Fiscal Year 2016
 * Q1: January - March
 * Q2: April - June
 * Q3: July - September
 * Q4: October - December
 * Q1: January - March
 * Q2: April - June
 * Q3: July - September
 * Q4: October - December