Editing team/Archive/Current priorities

Last updated: 2016-08-30.

Tranche 0: Interrupt
Maintaining the production service at a suitable quality level:
 * No loss/corruption of existing article data
 * No loss/corruption of the user's contribution
 * No security issues
 * No regression in performance
 * No regression in usability

Tranche 1: Release support
Support community-requested releases/deployments, and urgent key usability improvements as they arise
 * Goal: Provide a Beta Feature of a new wikitext editor, designed like the visual editor, integrated into its workflow, and with all its tools — T141149


 * Goal: Provide a single edit tab interface, and switch all WMF wikis over to using it (without any other change in configuration) — T102398
 * Goal: Run an A/B test of providing the visual editor by default rather than the wikitext editor on clicking 'edit' for a small proportion of anonymous users on the English Wikipedia — T119269
 * Goal: Enable by default for all users on all Wikisources – T138966 for bugs, then T138391 for deployment

Tranche 3: Language support
Expand VisualEditor's content language support
 * Goal: Enable by default for all users on the remaining "Phase 6" Wikipedias – T93387
 * ✅ Arabic scripts
 * Indic scripts – Assamese (as), Bhojpuri (bh), Bengali (bn), Tibetan (bo), Bishnupriya (bpy), Dzongkha (dz), Goan Konkani (gom), Gujarati (gu), Hindi (hi), Kannada (kn), Kashmiri (ks), Maithili (mai), Malayalam (ml), Marathi (mr), Nepali (ne), Nepal Bhasa (new), Oriya (or), Punjabi (pa), Pali (pi), Sanskrit (sa), Sinhala (si), Tamil (ta), Telugu (te)
 * Others – Aramaic (arc), Khmer (km), Lao (lo), Burmese (my), Thai (th), Cherokee (chr), Dhivehi (dv), Gothic (got), Tetum (tet), Twi (tw) – T125234
 * Goal: Enable by default for all users on the "Phase 7" Wikipedias – T93388
 * Support for "language conversion" blocks in Parsoid – T43716
 * Design and provide an interface to editing "language conversion" blocks – T49411

Tranche 2: Mobile MVP
Improve VisualEditor for mobile tablets and phones to the point where it is credible to provide it by default
 * Goal: Support sub-documents inside the editor stack, and use this to support loading parts of the page asynchronously and only when needed — T76544
 * Goal: Load parts of the editor asynchronously and only when needed — T54365
 * Goal: Provide a way to edit parts of a page (paragraphs, tables, images) individually — T50429

Tranche 5: Rich media tools
Improve the editing of various 'rich' editing tools so that particularly-difficult tasks are simplified – specifically:
 * Images, including uploads (part of MediaWiki core),
 * Formulæ ("Math" extension),
 * Charts ("Graph" extension),
 * Galleries (part of MediaWiki core), and
 * Sheet music ("Score" extension).

Tranche 6: Visual diffs
Provide an alternative to wikitext two-column diffs for users, in case they are not fluent in wikitext, and where it would be more appropriate. This covers:
 * Letting users choose between visual and wikitext views in the "Review your changes" tab inside the visual and new wikitext editors, on desktop and mobile — T143350
 * Letting users choose between visual and wikitext views in MediaWiki's diff page, on desktop and mobile — T105173
 * Exploring letting users "play" over the history of a page, seeing a stack of visual changes animate

Decision tree
Priority issues: Rating: Features:
 * Functionality regression
 * Performance regression
 * Data corruption
 * Security issue
 * Crash of entire editor
 * Crash of bits of editor (e.g. copy & paste stops working)
 * Very common -> Unbreak now! if a priority issue, Normal if not
 * Common -> High if a priority issue, Normal if not
 * Sometimes -> Normal if a priority issue, Low if not
 * Rare / very rare -> Low if a priority issue, Lowest if not
 * On list for this quarter -> High
 * On list for this year -> Normal
 * On list for next year -> Low
 * Not on list -> Lowest

Former tranches, now complete
Note: Former goals in active and former tranches are not listed for brevity.

Tranche 4: Link editor tweaks
Improve the link editing experience

Active for "FY2016Q2" (completed in October–December 2015).