MediaWiki Product Insights

This page serves as a landing page for Product research conducted to inform a strategic direction for MediaWiki and explore questions around stewardship, developer experiences, and broader Wikimedia open source strategy.

This work is anchored in the Wikimedia Foundation’s annual plan 2023-2024 (WE3 Knowledge Platform) but also goes beyond this timeline.

Goals for 2023/2024

 * A strategy for MediaWiki - by June 30th, 2024 [WE3]
 * 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]
 * Exploring and resolving a set of questions around stewardship and Open Source strategy (goes beyond MediaWiki) [WE3.3]

Research pillars and timeline

 * MediaWiki within Wikimedia’s ecosystem: Key challenges and opportunities. Includes interviews and review of existing write-ups (pre-kick off at the Hackathon, more interviews in August and September)
 * 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)

The research framework that describes these pillars in more detail is currently work in progress and will be published as part of the first Product Insights report in October.

We'll be sharing about this work in monthly emails and 3-4 Product Insights reports throughout the year.