Talk:Community Tech/Archive 1

Current activities
Perhaps the current team members would like to check in at this page and/or Community Tech with a brief description of what they are currently working on. Are they taking any action at Community Tech project ideas, for instance? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 20:16, 4 July 2015 (UTC)
 * The team is still being assembled and will be working mainly on establishing team processes and infrastructure for the immediate future. Stay tuned. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 14:54, 16 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Which does not explain why they should not at least introduce themselves to the community. It would be polite to receive a direct answer to my direct question, which I repeat here: Is the team taking any action at all at Community Tech project ideas?  The Community Tech project ideas page has been active for nearly three months, and it would be quite useful to the community to know when, or indeed if, the team will get round to looking at it.  I frankly cannot understand why the Community Tech team so adamantly refuses to engage in any way at all with the community.  Even a brief "hello" would be nice, but this continued and clear refusal to engage is simply an insult to the community.  What is the timetable for the team to complete its internal deliberations and start active engagement with the community, please?  (I may say at once that "stay tuned" is not an adequate response to that question).  The formation of this team is a commitment of the Call to Action.  As far as anyone outside the WMF can tell, nothing at all is happening. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 19:57, 25 July 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you for posting that information. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 21:36, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Our main priority thus far has been assembling the team and training our developers. The two engineers on the team (besides me) are both new to MediaWiki and have been learning the ropes. The team didn't even have an engineering manager until a couple weeks ago (and still doesn't have a product manager). We are at the point now, however, where we are ready to start working on community requests. Some pre-requisites for that include:
 * : Announce the launch of the team - should happen in the next week or so
 * : Document Community Tech on-wiki - in progress, expect more info to be posted this week
 * : Talk with Team Practices and figure out workflows - in progress
 * : Come up with potential criteria for scoring project/task ideas - in progress
 * : Build an initial work backlog for Community Tech based on one or more existing community wishlists - in discussion/analysis
 * Feel free to add comments/thoughts/suggestions to any of the bugs above. We will be posting a roadmap on this page some time this week with more information on what to expect over the next month. We have been keeping an eye on Community Tech project ideas and will be engaging with editors there very soon. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 23:01, 4 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you for that. Is "bug" the best way of describing the discussions on Phabricator: indeed, is Phabricator the best place to hold general wide-ranging discussions with the community as a whole?  I would suggest Meta for wider strategic discussion, Mediawiki for technical planning and Phabricator for workflow management. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 18:56, 7 August 2015 (UTC)
 * One of our main challenges at the moment is finding a good process for finding out what the communities want that doesn't exclude, or severely handicap, everyone who doesn't speak English. /Johan (WMF) (talk) 23:18, 18 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Surely this is not a novel problem, nor one that you are solving in isolation? See my comments at meta:https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community Engagement (Product)/Wikimania 2015 for some suggestions. Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 07:20, 31 August 2015 (UTC)

2015 MediaWiki User Survey
I'm just now learning about the Community Tech Team and I'm looking forward to the work you have before you. I'm a member of the MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group user group. We advocate and support the third-party users of MediaWiki. We recently completed a survey of MediaWiki users focused around technical and community aspects. I thought you all might be interested in the survey results. We just published a first pass at a prioritized 'wishlist' from the responses. I definitely think there some potential overlaps between Wikimedia movement-lead initiatives and third-party uses of MediaWiki. If you'd like more information or have any questions please let me know. Ckoerner (talk) 14:30, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
 * Thank you for the link! /Johan (WMF) (talk) 08:46, 30 August 2015 (UTC)

VR images and videos
hi, i was wondering if there is a discussion about integrating virtual reality pictures and videos into the wiki commons realm. of course, i can upload VR content. but how will visitors be able to see it properly using their VR glasses? best, Maximilian Schönherr (talk) 20:38, 3 September 2016 (UTC)
 * (Disclaimer: I'm not speaking for the Community Tech team.) There might have been some discussions on wiki in the Wikimedia Commons community but VR data has not been brought up in the Community Wishlist Survey 2015 as far as I know. I guess my questions would be the same as for 3D content on Wikimedia Commons: Which file formats are common for VR data? Which software solutions exist to view such files on your local machine with glasses connected? --Malyacko (talk) 12:06, 4 September 2016 (UTC)
 * i talked to an experienced photographer for wiki commons about file formats. we think that there's no difference with VR. a spherical 360° still image can be uploaded as jpeg or even gif – but the "consumer" needs to access the file with his VR glasses to appreciate the full function of the image. the same applies to moving images which can be converted into any format.
 * this (badly stitched) 360° spherical photo was shot with the google camera app on my smartphone and saved as jpeg. it looks horrible on a flat screen, but, even with the stitching errors, quite impressive in VR.
 * youtube and facebook almost aggressivly move into the VR domain. typical for their way to invite the consumer is to offer him/her a panning tool (top left corner in the case of youtube) so they can appreciate the video on their flat screen. see this example. the samsung 360° camera seems to record mp4 in H.264 quality. seems to me all video formats can be written in an appropriate video editing software.
 * if there's a better forum to discuss this, please let me know. Maximilian Schönherr (talk) 13:04, 4 September 2016 (UTC)