User:MSchottlender-WMF/Wikimedia Developer Summit 2018 - Position Paper

This is my position paper for the Wikimedia 2018 Developer Summit. This is published with my name as a member of the selection committee; the proposal selection is blind, so please do not publish your papers publicly.

Submit your proposal
To submit a proposal: We are very much interested in hearing from the different voices across the movement! If you know of a group or an individual whose voice is relevant, please consider reaching out to them to submit a proposal!
 * Read the Thematic overview - your proposal should touch or relate to one of the topics there.
 * See the tips for how to write your position paper
 * Refer to the available examples
 * Submit your proposal in the given form. DO NOT PUBLISH IT ONLINE! The selection process is blinded!

My position paper
The Wikimedia Foundation is a leader in many fields, but none as so obvious and otherwise so underserved anywhere else than that of language and accessibility. We are not just the fifth biggest site online, or one of the biggest open source endeavors available, we are the de facto leaders of technology that other commercial companies consider “edge case” and “less profitable”. This gives us an advantage of developing tools that don’t just help our own audience, but could — and should — serve as a repository for allowing everyone online to reach, support, and embrace these audiences with minimal effort.

We have many of the tools available already, for our own users and products, but they are still limited when it comes to sharing and using them outside the movement. And why? Developing our tools to be accessible to outside projects — and to cloud tools, to bots and to other Open Source organizations — is a doable task that is not just worthy in general, it also follows our mission.

What better way to empower “every single human being [to] freely share in the sum of all knowledge” than to share our own powerful tools with others to allow everyone to prioritize support for language, accessibility and right-to-left technologies and push these relevant technology forward?

I suggest we look across our technologies and libraries — from OOjs UI to CSSJanus, ResourceLoader to wfMessage, and many others — and work to better generalize these to serve our own users better in their projects, bots, and cloud tools — and to place ourselves firmly and officially as the leaders of this technology that we already are.

Now that my position is known, my direction is unknowable — Heisenberg Uncertainty Principle.

So let’s break reality, and figure out both.