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 Q3 (January - March 2017) are posted for the Product teams. 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.
 * Technical Collaboration Guideline
 * Development Principles
 * Design Principles
 * 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.
 * Product Development Personas (Draft)
 * Product development process (Draft)

2016 Community Wishlist Survey
2016 Community Wishlist Survey has completed the voting stage. Results will be posted on December 15th. There were 265 proposals, 1132 contributors, 5037 support votes this year. The proposals will be reviewed by all Product teams for inclusion into goals beyond the top ten committed to by the Community Tech team. The full list will continued to be worked on at Hackathons and discussed at the Dev Summit in January.

Monthly CREDIT Showcase
Members of our community, Reading, Editing, Discovery and Technology teams show off new work and experiments.
 * Most Recent Showcase: December 7, 2016 (WebM on Commons or 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
Initial load tests to determine performance levels for cross-project searching were completed successfully. We are now testing how many results are produced for typical queries as a first step towards figuring out how relevant the results are. The Interactive team also released tabular and map data namespaces to Commons. The team thanks legal and other teams involved for for their review and consultation prior to this release.
 * 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 to consolidate our various data sources into one place. We've worked with Analytics Engineering on documentation for the Dashiki dashboarding system, which is now published, and consulted with Research to understand the provenance and purpose of some of the historical measures. We're working on the historic "ee" dashboards, and have begun migrating them to a new dashboard.

The Language team work on a system inside ContentTranslation to translate uses of templates to the target wiki, allowing experts to mark which bits of each template lines up with others, is now in production. A bug that prevented publishing for some pages was fixed and we are still monitoring for any critical bugs with templates on production. The development team had to review the scope of the first version of this feature, after it was observed during research sessions that some gaps needed to be addressed urgently. The Help page is being updated and a blog post was published last week.

Our quarterly goal, as part of "Maintain and incrementally improve current content creation and curation interfaces", is to provide a unified, consistent editing interface between mobile and desktop Web, and between visual and wikitext editors. The initial version of the editor is complete, and has passed final user testing. We plan to release the Beta Feature this week for opt-in testing. Work on further features for this is underway. We demonstrated the wikitext editing mode of the visual editor at the December Product showcase, alongside a demo of real-time collaborative editing.

We're working on visual diffing, which allow users who don't know wikitext to see the changes they're making as they edit, and will give a better way to spot some subtle changes in edits. The initial version is merged and we're working on the interaction design to support the richness of wikitext edits. Our principal quarterly goal for Q3 January–March 2017 will be to provide it inside the MediaWiki visual editor, and eventually we will provide it outside the editor too as an option when looking at diffs in any context. In January we will demonstrate the prototype to developers with a technical talk explaining the technologies behind it.

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 have had an extremely stable campaign for "Big English".
 * Fr-tech has noted that, if we had not moved to redis, campaigns would have gone down daily in our first week. We would not have had the best fundraising day ever.
 * We are currently investigating 4 payment integrations: ingenico, paypal, apple and android. We usually investigate new features during big english but 4 processors simultaneously is unusual and unexpected. However there is increased WMF-wide interest to plan these out.
 * We are also continuing to triage and react to live bugs in support of the campaign.

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
iOS has released the Beta for v5.3.2 of the Wikipedia app via TestFlight. This version brings two major updates, support for variable size text throughout the app, based on the user's OS level Text Size accessibility setting (aka "Dynamic Type") and an improved database, which should result in improved performance and stability, particularly using the Explore and Saved tabs.Yesterday we also closed our first survey of app users, to better understand their needs and motivations. We look forward to analyzing those responses, and hope to share high level results in the next quarter. Many thanks to the thousands of users who answered our question.

Wikipedia Android app has a new release. This release includes full support for Android 7 (Nougat), support for announcements in the Explore feed, improved system notifications for Wikipedia Zero, home screen widgets are now resizable, improved animations when dismissing/restoring cards in the feed, internal overhaul of network functions for improved performance, and numerous fixes for bugs and crashes. Special thanks to the volunteer contributors who submitted patches for this release, Amir Aharoni (IRC: aharoni, Wikipedia User:Amire80), Anirudh S (https://github.com/anirudh24seven), Himanshu Lakhara (https://plus.google.com/+HimanshuLakhara), Kunal Grover (https://github.com/kunalgrover05), Odysseas Kristalakos ( https://github.com/OdysseasKr )

The New Readers team is taking feedback on their proposals for prototypes from the New Readers Research round.

Reading Web team has made a few updates. ReadMore has been enabled on Japanese and Spanish wikis (mobile site). The Wikidata Page banner has been enabled on Finnish Wikivoyage. Wikidata page descriptions has been enabled on French and German wikipedias (mobile site) and the lead image has been disabled from the mobile site, beta mode.

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
New development input is being requested on Avoiding breaking gadgets when developing UI. Also the team is reviewing discussion on the wishlist at What government data is of best interest? Have a look at PAWS, a tool to create Wikidata bots. Also the Histropedia Wikidata Query Timeline tool received some recent improvements. New features include: Automatic detection of timeline data from the Vertical spacing controls + auto-fit mode, SPARQL query, color coding, multiple filters, new help popups.

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