Wikimedia Engineering/2012-13 Goals

Purpose of this document: Goals for the Wikimedia Engineering and Product Development department, fiscal year 2012-13 (July 1, 2012 - June 30, 2013).

Our top three priorities for fiscal year 2012-13 are:


 * the development and launch of the Visual Editor;
 * the development and launch of a new notifications system, improved user-to-user messaging, and smaller enhancements that drive editor engagement;
 * the development and launch of first mobile contribution features, Wikipedia Zero pilot, and other mobile/tablet improvements.

The Big Picture
To create a user experience that's not only engaging but delightful, we will need to continually modernize MediaWiki, Wikimedia's technical infrastructure, and our development processes. This work will certainly not end in July 2013, but we anticipate that we'll be able to reach several important milestones.

Our vision for July 2013 is centered on increasing engagement and reducing barriers:


 * 1) We will modernize the editor. We'll have a fast, scalable visual editor which can perform (single-user) visual editing of any document in the Wikimedia corpus. It will be available to all users on demand. It will be ready to be the new default editing environment, or close to ready. This Visual Editor will be available on the majority of Wikimedia projects, and will ideally be the first user interface you see as a new user.
 * 2) We will connect with the user. We will implement the foundations of a modern notifications system which will be at the center of a user's experience of Wikimedia as a living, breathing community. Whether you're receiving new messages, noticing updates to your watchlist, looking for things to do; whether you're logged out or logged in, on a desktop or on your phone, you'll be able to get updates about what's going on. This is a major architectural undertaking which will support future efforts to improve messaging, task management, project affiliation, mobile contribution methods, and more. It's a modernization project that will help bring Wikimedia's user experience to the level of other highly engaging sites and services. See Echo (Notifications).
 * 3) We will increase site responsiveness. When we keep users waiting for a result of their actions, we are treating their time as having no value. This is unacceptable. Wait times reduce the productivity of experienced editors, and likely have a negative impact on the retention of new contributors as well. While we've always disabled functionality that has had a negative performance impact, more systematic profiling and key improvements to slow operations (like the parsing of complex pages) will help us achieve measurable impact.
 * 4) We will engage our mobile audience. We've successfully expanded our mobile reach, and we will continue to do so, especially through programs like Wikipedia Zero.  The bigger challenge on mobile now is to begin growing a community of users who contribute through their smartphone and their tablet. This will include photo contribution, and we'll also want to experiment with simple editing tasks, microtasks like content curation, and improved contribution user interfaces specifically for tablets.  As part of this process, we will bake mobile support fully into MediaWiki core.
 * 5) We will make small changes that have big impact. An entire team will be dedicated to running small experiments and tests focused on the new editor experience: to learn exactly which software or process changes are likely to increase the engagement of new editors who able to make valuable contributions. This will help inform our product priorities going forward, and where changes are obvious wins and easy to productize, we will make them.
 * 6) We will recognize rich media contributors as first class citizens. MediaWiki was built as a text collaboration platform, with support for various media types bolted onto it over time. While tools like the new Upload Wizard have greatly helped simplify media contributions, there is still a lot of work to do to make the experience of adding a picture or video as seamless as the experience of editing text – and to provide tools for the community to manage quality and metadata.
 * 7) We will create a language-aware user experience. MediaWiki's internationalization team has made tremendous progress in eliminating barriers to participation, especially for Indic languages. But in its current implementation, language merely exists in the form of a set of disconnected user preferences. We don't recognize the user as, say, a Malayalam speaker; we don't provide a coherent user interface for changing content language, chrome, font, input method, etc. And translation of important information for our users is still a very process-intensive task which does not yet feel like a fully natural part of the experience. Beyond further improving language support, the user experience will be at the center of continuing internationalization efforts.

The foundation of our work is our commitment to sustain and protect Wikimedia's core operations. Half a billion people rely on our projects every month. Given the transformative software changes we're making, including the increasing operational complexity involved, this will indeed be a significant challenge beyond simply adding capacity. We will need to re-architect services, data-center operations, and service management as part of our responsibility to maximize uptime, ensure proper backups and publicly available data dumps, and report service availability and performance.

This ambitious plan requires that we continue to improve the way we work:


 * We need to partner with the community in complex feature projects. Whenever we undertake complex projects, our goal should be to make visible progress as quickly as possible, and seek active involvement of volunteers in the process of requirements analysis, design, testing, continued development and maintenance, in short: in the full cycle of work involved in creating a complex project. Work with the community, accordingly, is a full cycle engagement by many individuals with many different skillsets. In the next year, we'll build out a whole new function in engineering: community-driven software testing. We will also continue to improve our approaches to technical communications, outreach, translation, etc.


 * We have to get serious about big data. We've already begun modernizing our analytics infrastructure, and this process will continue. Our goal is to be able to collect and process vast amounts of real-time data about Wikimedia projects' usage, and to be able to understand patterns in that data at any level. This entails building out a whole new architecture for data collection and processing, and a new flexible dashboard for visualizing key metrics.


 * We need to give the community tools to innovate. The continued development of and support for the Wikimedia Labs project, and continued improvement to on-wiki development capabilities like gadgets and page-embedded JavaScript, will help create the foundation for true innovation with low barriers to entry. In addition to building out new services like toolserver-style database replication, we will need to create better authentication/authorization models (like OpenID/OAuth) which will enable the development of various tools and applications. Finally, as we've switched our development model to Git, we also have opportunities to create technical interfaces with large existing development communities on sites like GitHub and Gitorious.


 * We can't afford review bottlenecks. Whether it's feedback on features or contributions of code, the process of triaging, responding to, or acting upon any kind of community contribution should be an open one – and we need to actively work to grow communities of volunteer responders, liaisons, code reviewers, and so on. If we become the bottleneck, we will always fall behind, no matter how responsive we aim to be.


 * We must reduce our technical debt. Our complex legacy codebase continues to weigh heavily on us, and slows down any efforts to transform the user experience. Increasing test coverage, implementing test automation tools, eliminating cruft, and continually deploying code will be essential to increasing the pace of development. The increasing adoption of agile methodology within the Wikimedia engineering organization, and improvements to team culture and team collaboration, are equally important.

Our plan, if resourced, will certainly take us closer to solving the key challenges the Wikimedia Foundation is facing today. Specifically, if we want to increase the retention of new users and the engagement of our community, none of the activities described below are optional – they can merely be deferred. But even if we undertake all these programs, many frontiers will remain, and each new development will unlock new possibilities and opportunities. Our reach, in other words, will continue to exceed our grasp. We can take comfort in the fact that while many of our challenges are not ours alone, our endeavor is unique and changing the world for the better.

Definitions

 * Goal statement (what are we trying to achieve)
 * Rationale (how does this project relate to our overall strategy)
 * Resources (broad outline of current and additional resources assigned to this project, including % allocation for partially allocated or part-time staff)
 * Activities (what concrete work will be undertaken through this project)
 * Outputs and outcomes (what will the delta be to current state as a result of this project, in terms of metrics, new functionality, new process, and ultimately towards our strategic goals)
 * Quarterly milestones (when will major milestones of this project be hit, with focus on the 2012-13 fiscal year)
 * Interdependencies (do we need help from other departments/individuals to successfully reach this goal)

Key Goals

 * 1) Keep the Lights on: An uptime metric of 99.85% for the mediawiki projects readers (i.e., Wikipedia, Wikinews, Wikitionary, Wikibooks, Wikiquote, Commons,  Wikisource and Wikiversity), and a 99.8% uptime for editors.
 * 2) Support growth: Ensure sufficient computing and network capacity to meet demands of the new projects, 30% growth in user traffic and 200% growth in multimedia contents
 * 3) Support new services: Work in partnership with the development team to implement new systems and services
 * 4) Improve data center setup by completing transition to new primary data center in Ashburn, VA (EQIAD)
 * 5) Improve/reduce response times by 70ms for users/readers in Asia and West Coast USA (by redirecting users to the nearest server cluster)
 * 6) Reduce operating cost of the data centers without compromising quality and availability

Rationale/Background

 * The current (2011/2012) site uptime goal for en.wikimedia.org is 99.85%. To-date, we are at about 99.97%. The Goal for 2012/2013 is more comprehensive, it includes availability goals for the nine mediawiki project sites, for both ‘read’ and ‘write’. It also takes into account there would be more Mediawiki releases to the platform and to the application, thus higher chance of introducing bugs and downtime to the platform.


 * While Ashburn datacenter is already serving the majority of wikimedia projects readers (through our caching layer) and  over 80% of network bandwidth,  it is still not the primary data-center. All edits are still going through Tampa data center. We will make our Ashburn data center the primary site.

We could shave off a substantial amount of latency, improving users WP experience when we have a caching center closer to them. Today, an average page makes a minimum of 3 round trips to the closest data-center to complete what is required to gather the page for the user. Right now, a user in Hong Kong ¾ secs just to download the page, on top of rendering latency. If we successfully bring up a West Coast caching center, that would remove at least 25+% of the total page download time. If we bring up an Asian caching center, it would reduce it by about 90%. This effect is multiplied for https (secure) calls, as well as for subpar network connections, such as mobile or those often found in the Global South. Google found that an extra 500ms of latency dropped traffic by 20% in 2006 Amazon also found major effects in latency with their sales. By not having an Asian caching center we are increasing latency for our APAC users by 600-1000ms per page load. A west coast caching center would reduce latency by 210-350ms per page load for APAC and west coast users. For a first caching center, due to network interconnectivity, a West Coast caching center would give us the biggest impact versus cost.
 * The  ping Response Times (ms) from various cities to en.wikimedia.org are listed below. As the numbers show, because our datacenters are in Tampa, Ashburn and Amsterdam, the response times are longer for places further away from the data centers.


 * We will actively seek ways to lower our operating expenses such as renegotiating better contracts and exploring donation opportunities.

Team

 * Existing staff & contractors
 * New: IT Systems Engineer position to focus on non-core projects like CRM, Survey Tools, Backups & Archives
 * New: Storage / DBA Engineer to help Asher (who will be spending more time on the Application and Site Performance Project)
 * New: Operations contractor to work on West Coast data center transition (3 months)
 * Wishlist: Operations Security Engineer to ensure that systems/services are set up correctly and securely, and that security risks are mitigated
 * Wishlist: Operations Software Developer to improve tools and systems relied upon in the day-to-day work of the ops team

Ongoing operations work

 * Operational Support
 * Ticket management (RT)
 * Data Center duties
 * Support for deployments and configuration changes, including Wikipedia Zero launches w/ partners


 * Capacity Growth
 * Storage growth expected to be at least about 100%
 * Site traffic (page views) growth expected to be 30 %
 * Network traffic growth expected to be 50%
 * Existing projects (e.g., Analytics & Labs)


 * Site Availability
 * Server refresh of equipment that is >4 years old
 * Service orchestration/automation improvements
 * Disaster recovery and backups


 * Site Security
 * Patching infrastructure security vulnerabilities
 * Applications maintenance


 * Cost savings
 * Reach out to get sponsorship for more Caching Centers around the world, with goals of caching locations in Asia and South America

Interdependencies
Most of the interdependencies are internal to engineering. New services are typically built out in partnership with development teams, and utilize Wikimedia Labs as a staging platform. The site performance team helps provide monitoring and advice to ensure all services operate efficiently (see for instance response times goals, mentioned also in ).

Key Goals

 * 1) Double the number of users and projects on Wikimedia Labs infrastructure
 * 2) Launch tool labs, new infrastructure for tools, bots, and simple MediaWiki development
 * 3) Stabilize and maintain deployment-prep labs environment for community testing and test automation

Rationale/Background
As of September 2012, the Labs infrastructure has the following statistics:

Tool Labs will expand labs with capabilities currently offered by the Wikimedia Toolserver cluster (which is hosted by Wikimedia Germany). This includes database replication from the live sites. It will address data privacy concerns, come with better hardware, and will be built on the same open source stack as the rest of Labs, enabling a straightforward transition path from tools to MediaWiki development.

Team

 * Ryan Lane (lead)
 * Andrew Bogott (Dev-Ops Engineer)
 * Faidon Liambotis (Ops Engineer)
 * Sara Smollett (Ops Engineer - part time)
 * Chris McMahon (QA Lead) (10%)
 * Antoine Musso (Continuous Integration engineer)
 * New: QA Engineer to work on test automation
 * New: Dev-Ops Program Manager (50%) for cross-functional coordination

Reversing the editor decline
To the extent that Wikimedia's projects are seeing declining or stagnating participation, our goal is to arrest those trends and return to positive growth in high quality contributions. The key activities that will support this goal are undertaken by multiple teams: the editor engagement features team, the editor engagement experimentation team, the visual editor team, the multimedia contribution team, and the mobile contribution team. We also see site performance as strongly linked to editor engagement, but are listing it separately below.

Goal

 * 1) The notifications system ("Project Echo") seeks to unify the delivery of interaction messages in MediaWiki core in a common API in a manner that can be extended for performance and scalability and provide a uniform interface for the user managing their notifications.
 * 2) The messaging system seeks to introduce a public user-to-user messaging system that incorporates modern concepts such as conversations, notifications, and UI that matches user expectations. It will not yet aim to replace all talk pages, but instead focus on user-to-user interactions.

Rationale
Currently interactions on the site are handled in an ad hoc manner. For example:


 * User edits a page, if it is in someone's watchlist, the watchlist is updated (which may also generate an e-mail notification).
 * If a user wants to initiate direct communication, the user writes on the recipient's user talk page. An in-wiki indicator is set ("You have new messages").

Fundamentally, any approach to dealing with Editor Engagement is about an interaction between two users either directly (messaging) or mediated by an object on the Wiki (Article Page, for instance). The essential key to close the communication loop in editor engagement interactions are some sort of real-time notifications about what's happening. We believe notifications features will help increase retention of editors who have already decided to make their first edit on Wikipedia. We know from speaking with our existing editors that one of the reasons they come back is because something is "always happening on Wikipedia": someone expands an article they just created, someone sends them a barnstar, someone writes on their talk page. Actions such as these draw a user back to Wikipedia. Oftentimes, new users don't even know that these actions have even taken place. By notifying users in a visible, user-friendly way that these actions have happened, we hope to draw new editors back to Wikipedia and increase retention.

Currently, notifications are handled in a spaghetti manner that is created ad hoc, and can't be extended. This means for each notification or message in the system needs to separately solve each of the following goals, that should have a unified UI and architecture:
 * How the user manages their preference on receiving notifications
 * How a notification is delivered to the user for multiple possible endpoints. Right now there is one possible endpoint for each notification and only the (first) two endpoints currently exist for all of them. For example:
 * Send a bacn message over email?
 * Update a status bar on page load? (Current status bar has terrible UI)
 * Use a real-time web sockets to push a notification while user is idle?
 * Show status on mobile web skin?
 * Push a notification as a mobile push?
 * Push a notification over SMS?
 * Push over IM services or IRC?
 * Push to a third party service or bot?
 * How the notification list is accessed in the UI, for multiple types of UI (i.e. mobile)
 * The message actually sent as a function of the constraints of the UI (i.e. mobile push and SMS notifications have length restrictions)
 * Each interaction combination of the above has a scalability consideration
 * Each interaction combination of the above has a performance expectation (asynchronous: publisher of notification does not expect to be blocked)
 * 3rd party support in the case when integrated in MediaWiki core (esp. as asynchronous is not easy to support in PHP)
 * How these notifications might be bundled ("Page has been updated 15x" instead of receiving 15 separate notifications)

Communications between new editors and experienced editors are an important part of the "onboarding" process for new editors. New editors learn the ins and outs of editing Wikipedia through interactions with experienced editors, largely through the existing user talk system. The existing messaging dynamic (current user talk pages) is not based on any existing affordance that is found outside the MediaWiki space and has many problems. Among the issues:


 * there are unclear social conventions of how to respond
 * there is no single canonical place for this interaction to live
 * the concept of a conversation is vague (both from a user and technical perspective), notifications (see above) to all parties are crude/non-existent.
 * the UI does not represent anything resembling a modern discussion system (does not resemble any existing web affordance).
 * there is no consistent or relatable framework for surfacing a new messaging event (update) to the user (in the form of a notification)

As messaging actually covers a wealth of user-user interactions and requires a notification system to close the loop. The primary focus in the next fiscal year is only on a single user-user "talk page"-like discussion, spec'd out in a "mobile-first" design manner, to create realistic constraints on the complexity of the problem.

The relationship between a new user-to-user messaging system and the existing talk page system is still to be determined. Ideally, we will have one system that works for all of our user groups. We realize, however, that our experienced users rely heavily on the existing user talk page system. We will need to evaluate the various options (e.g., the addition development effort required for a backwards compatible system, the increased complexity and confusion of having two systems run in parallel, transitioning to a new system while having an accessible archive of existing discussions, etc.) before making a determination.

Team
This team conducts both features work and the support/maintenance work identified below, with percentages worked out based on specific projects' needs and priorities:


 * Brandon Harris
 * Fabrice Florin
 * Dario Taraborelli (shared with experimentation team)
 * Ryan Kaldari
 * Benny Situ
 * Matthias Mullie
 * Luke Welling
 * Vibha Bamba (shared with mobile team)
 * 2011-12 hire: SDE Frontend

Very low availability (10 hours/week) but limited support:
 * Andrew Garrett
 * Timo Tijhof

For the notifications project, we'd ideally also like to partner with Wikia, who have built their own lightweight notification system which might serve as the model for the shallow (MediaWiki core) implementation.

Activities
Most modern websites (Facebook, Google+, Twitter) deal with both the notification and the messaging problem by setting up a performance and scalable message-passing queueing system under a common architecture. Such an architecture can be built, if hooks and interfaces are standardized in MediaWiki core in a manner that allows graceful fallback for 3rd-party install.

In addition to the above, messaging has a backing data store and management requirement that is different from the exisiting "wikipage" paradigm as that is both too fully featured (entails requirements like being able to edit other people's "messages", revision history, and the ability to change discussion error), and not featured enough (convention enforces a "threaded" discussion, no notification of delivery, lives in only one place without indication to at least automatic indication to all participants of a new message).

Notifications involves standardizing both the message types (an extensible architecture for adding more message types) as well as supporting existing and future endpoints (* means currently in MediaWiki):
 * e-mail*
 * watchlist update*
 * on-wiki notification (* current on-wiki notification has broken UI)
 * notification indicator and access on mobile web
 * mobile push notification
 * XMPP (instant messaging, IRC)
 * HTTP REST calls onto 3rd party services/bot integration (without polling)
 * etc.

Interdependencies

 * Ops: Queuing infrastructure and deployment, storage architecture for messages, possible web sockets and mobile push infrastructure
 * Platform: integration into MediaWiki
 * Mobile: Reformat notifications for mobile web, mobile push notifications (and infrastructure)
 * Wikia: Have an existing synchronous notification system. Notifications infrastructure should support it or provide hooks for it.

Output and Outcomes
We will track both the direct usage of these features as well as attempt to quantify their impact on the editor retention problem.

Some potential metrics:
 * Basic stats (e.g., number of messages, notifications sent, average number of users per discussion, discussion per user per day, etc.).
 * Impact on retention (e.g., impact of user-to-user messaging on retention)

Goal
Features developed by the Editor Engagement team will require maintenance (e.g. analysis, bug fixing, enhancements, etc.). There also may be features from the EEE team which will require productization.

Rationale
We need to make sure that features we develop are not orphaned after launch. Features will require maintenance and continual attention to ensure that they are achieving their desired objectives.

Team
As above.

Activities
Continue to support, maintain and integrate existing features: Maintain new features:
 * Feedback Dashboard
 * Article Creation Workflow
 * Page Triage
 * Article Feedback
 * Notifications
 * Messaging
 * Global Profile (TBD)

Outputs and Outcomes

 * Quantitative metrics TBD, but here are some examples:
 * Increase second-month retention rate to 37% (up from 33%)
 * Increase number New Wikipedians/month to the English Wiikipedia by 10%

Milestones by quarter
Note that the timeline also needs to factor in two aspects.
 * 1) maintenance of ongoing and completed projects
 * 2) extra load from contracting services winding down
 * 3) other curation process improvements as iterated from existing activities or provided as results from the EE Experimentation team

(up to) FY2011-12: the existing team will be working on the following features until at least end of May 2012:
 * Article Creation Workflow
 * Article Feedback: Finish v5 iteration
 * Page Triage

Interdependencies

 * Mobile
 * E3 team

Goals
To conduct small, rapid experiments focused on improving the experience of new good faith contributors. This divides into the following goals:


 * 1) Build dedicated, agile, rapid experiments team
 * 2) Create prioritized, goal-oriented, actionable backlog of experiments to run
 * 3) Conduct experiments related to product features
 * 4) Conduct experiments related to community change/engagement
 * 5) Conduct editor meet-ups/convenvings

Rationale
Much of the rationale for Editor Engagement Features teams is applicable to this team. The difference between the two teams is how they address the problem of editor decline. While the former team (EE) will focus on medium- to long-term foundational projects, the EEE team will undertake deep community, product, and policy thinking, testing different ways to approach editor retention.

Over the past year, we have learned a lot about editor behavior by looking to Wikimedia’s raw data in new ways. Based upon ideas extracted from that data, we began experimental projects such as A/B testing of user warning templates to evaluate our assumptions about user behavior as related to editor retention.

We see real value in continuing to experiment with quick and dirty ideas that may help us reverse this decline in Wikipedia participation. As such, we have formed a new cross-functional team tasked specifically with conducting these small, rapid experiments. Our goal is conduct many different types of experiments -- maybe just simple tweaks, maybe ideas that should become fully-fledged new features -- and then feed the features, ideas, and changes that show the most potential impact into the product pipeline (e.g. user account creation process overhaul), into the community (e.g. supporting policy changes) or even having the experiments team quickly implement adjustments if that’s the quickest path to positive change (e.g. changing content of user warning templates).

Some experiments may be technically focused, some community-focused, and all will have a strong measurement component that includes explicit recommendations -- e.g. “Experiment X shows no impact on editor retention, and may even have a negative impact, and should not be considered for inclusion in the product” or “Experiment Y approach shows a potential 2x impact on retention of editors in the 50-500 edit range and should be included in the roadmap for ABC features.”

Team
The new team will re-organize existing resources from both the Community and Product teams, comprised of the following people (note titles may change):


 * Steven Walling (Product owner)
 * Maryana Pinchuk (Community organizer)
 * Ori Livneh (Engineer)
 * S Page (Engineer)
 * Munaf Assaf (UX designers)
 * Ryan Faulkner (Data analyst)
 * Dario Taraborelli (Senior data analyst), supporting all product teams
 * Aaron Halfaker (data analyst, part time contractor), supporting editor engagement teams
 * Stuart Geiger (data analyst, part time contractor)

Additionally, we will be hiring new development resources so that this team can freely conduct experiments that require coding and UI/design expertise.

In the current fiscal year 2011-2012 (by July 1), we hope to hire the following positions, which have just been approved ‘out of budget’ by Sue:
 * Senior Software Engineer and ScrumMaster
 * Front-End Developer ✅
 * UI/UX Designer (reporting to Howie) ✅

In the 2012-2013 fiscal year (after July 1), we also plan to hire an additional two engineers and two more community analysts/organizers:
 * Front-End software engineer
 * Back-End software engineer
 * Community Organizer

The engineering staff members in this team will be hired and managed by Alolita Sharma.

Activities
The backlog for this team is currently being built out. A draft spreadsheet listing and ranking potential experiments is available here. Note this is not yet ready for consumption outside of WMF. Experiments will be listed onwiki as we undertake them.

Output and Outcomes
Impact assessment of conducted experiments will occur on an ongoing basis. Results -- both positive and negative -- will be communicated to other product teams, foundation staff, and the community as experiments are completed.

Ongoing process

 * The team will employ agile methodologies to sprint on the experiments we choose to run.
 * Experiments may be product or community focused, e.g. policy test vs. A/B test of a feature.
 * Should an experiment show promise as a feature that can be productized, the team will coordinate with other Product and Engineering and Analytic team members as appropriate to get the new feature into the roadmap as soon as is reasonable.

Interdependencies

 * Analytics: Most, if not all, of the E3 features will require measurement that existing functionality (e.g., existing click-tracking extension) does not cover. Work closely with Analytics team to ensure that our requirements are covered in their build-out plans.
 * Hiring: this new team will not be able to code new experimental features without engineering or UI/design staff.
 * Community: The new team will continue to rely on community input and community contacts to socialize product ideas. We will also continue holding editor research meet-ups to focus-group test ideas and/or gather new ideas for experimentation.
 * Code Review, QA, Deployment, and Documentation support (Platform team)
 * Labs support (Platform / Ops teams)

Goals
The proposed Multimedia team will build features that will enable easier contribution of multimedia content to Wikimedia projects. Specifically, the following areas will be addressed:


 * Improve curation and feedback tools to manage new and existing contribution streams
 * Enable multimedia contributions in a more user-friendly and seamless manner
 * Improve display of multimedia content



Rationale
At the present time, the number of Commons contributors is one of the few editor engagement metrics that are increasing. Over the past year, Commons has seen 25% year-over-year growth in contributors. The web is also moving towards more visually driven interfaces, so having strong multimedia support helps WMF meet the expectations of modern readers.

In fiscal year 2011-12, we have developed the technology infrastructure that previously was not available to support the storage and use of large amounts of multimedia. This is a necessary precondition for increased investment in contribution tools in the next fiscal year.

When developing new contribution streams (mobile photo uploads, improved integration of uploading into Wikimedia projects, etc.), we have to keep in mind that we are likely to receive a significant amount of low-quality or inappropriate uploads. Accordingly, we want to focus our investment not simply on increasing the inflow of new contributions, but also on improving quality management tools, including simple means for audience feedback.

Team
There are currently no resources assigned to Multimedia.

Proposed resources:
 * New: Product Manager
 * New: Senior Software Developer
 * New: Front-end Developer
 * New: Back-end Developer
 * 2011-12 hire: Interaction Designer (shared, 25-50%)

Activities

 * Support photo upload features developed by the mobile team with backend improvements and curation tools.
 * Improve integration between Wikimedia Commons and client projects like Wikipedia or third party users
 * Improve display/playback of various types of multimedia content
 * Support for competitions/contests

Output and Outcomes

 * Target: xx commons contributors/month

Interdependencies

 * Mobile will hit us in Q1 with their first pilots related to mobile photo upload. Likely we won't see immediate uptake, but if the team is successful in driving mobile media contributions, this will dictate a strong focus on curation/quality control tools early on -- a good problem to have.
 * Will drive a lot of storage load on Site Operations, and we may need to build out a larger job queuing and transcoding processing infrastructure as TimedMediaHandler goes online, video on commons grows drastically, or the community comes to a decision on policy supporting (or not) licensed encumbered codecs (i.e. H.264 output for mobile devices older than iOS5 and Android ICS).

Goal Statement
To create a reliable rich-text editor that allows for editing underlying wikitext on multiple platforms (including mobile) and facilitate a possible future implementation of real-time collaborative editing.

To solve this problem a working two-way parser is needed. In the current platform implementation, wikitext is converted directly to output but there is no association of the output to the underlying wikitext. Part of the Visual Editor involves a parser that translates wikitext into a working two-way data model, and an API that provides reliable client-server interaction on this model.

Rationale
This relates directly to the editor retention issue:
 * The decline in new contributor growth is the single most serious challenge facing the Wikimedia movement since 2007.
 * Board feels that editor retention is the most important focus for the Foundation.

How the visual editor addresses the above problem:


 * A visual editor removes the two major impediments for new or inexperienced editors, thus increasing the number of Wikimedia contributors:
 * 1) The technical expertise to deal with wiki markup and templating usage is a high hurdle
 * 2) The UI for editing is terrible
 * Many key features for Editor Engagement are dependent on a working two-way parser that the project is building. Examples:
 * An annotation/collaboration (e.g. comments in Google Doc) Talk Page replacement needs access to the underlying wikitext from within the output UI for positioning.
 * Improvements for directed forms of user involvement (microtasking) can only be hooked into with a user-friendly, context-sensitive UI when the output to underlying markup language is available programmatically
 * Visual diffs would now be possible and assist new and existing editors with evaluating changes to the Wiki.
 * Other key features for Editor Engagement are dependent on a working visual editor. Examples:
 * Messaging would probably occur in abbreviated wikitext and would require a lightweight visual editor.
 * A VE opens the door to other modes of communication that aren't as heavy with convention as "Talk Pages" such as chat, forums, threaded discussion systems, and annotations.
 * Recording time-sensitive diffs is possible within the visual editor framework. This could help editors catch things hard to find in a regular diff. (For instance, a single change where an malicious editor moves a block of text from one area to another, and then buries a policy-violating change inside the block become evident when it is played back in time.)

Activities
There are four areas of focus/design considerations: 1. Parser 2. MediaWiki integration 3. "Platform": contentEditable, linear model, UI, etc. 4. Pluggability/Extensibility


 * Make the new parser the feature-complete for Wikitext markup and rendering
 * Build a complete client-side data model that allows for support to be extended.
 * Build a working user interface (UI: inspector, toolbar, contextual menus) that is configurable and extensible. A generalized Inspector System
 * Research how to handle difficult parts of pages like images and tables
 * Provide graceful fallback with primitive editing support for unsupported Wikitext elements and templates.
 * Possible further research into collaboration-based features (through 3rd party or GSoC)

Outputs and outcomes

 * A feature complete parser that passes all the unit tests:
 * Should not break existing content
 * Some obscure wikitext patterns may need to be renormalized and converted to fix the above goal, but the target behavior is to have the parser without the above
 * Should mark output content so bi-directional roundtripping does not modify the original wikitext
 * Will hopefully become the canonical description for the underlying wikitext (folded into MediaWiki core)
 * A working parser allows for two-way interaction between the user interface and the underlying wikitext
 * Ability to load and save an entire wiki page using the visual editor.
 * Ability to extend the user interface with user-created gadgets and/or wiki-specific features and extensions (e.g. allowing the citations extension to add UI functionality for also enabling ISBN lookups, i18n, etc within the Visual Editor).

Team

 * Trevor Parscal (lead)
 * Roan Kattouw (50%-75%)
 * Gabriel Wicke
 * Rob Moen
 * Senior Software Developer (2011-12 hire)
 * Technical Product Analyst (2011-12 hire)

Cooperation with Wikia:
 * Inez Korczynski (CE, may assist in parser)
 * Christian Williams (CE, started around Feb 1st)

Ops resources:
 * Currently no need for additional resources
 * When in production, it may be possible that there is a need for some node.js infrastructure (this is not finalized). Though this is likely to be contained by repurposing existing parser infrastructure with the more efficient parser.
 * If collaboration feature is added, there might be a need for additional resource infrastructure

Interdependencies
Wikia:
 * Their main goal is to replace CK editor infrasturcture with the CE Visual Editor.
 * A secondary goal is to prevent the pitfalls of divergent codebases that they have in MediaWiki core.

Editor Engagement Team. At some point there needs to be sync up:
 * Assist in UI problems (how to edit tables)
 * Social aspect of visual editor (multiple contributors)
 * Editor engagement usage of the parser and the visual editor

Ops assistance:
 * Review node.js infrastructure developed in Labs

Mobile (VE acts as a provider of resources to mobile):
 * Current design should support mobile editing (Android ICS and iOS 5) which should facilitate adoption by the mobile team

Goal statement
For 2012-13, we would like to professionalize our process of performance engineering. In so doing, we plan to appreciably improve the user experience for editors and readers, and more efficiently utilize capacity of existing hardware requisitions.

Specifically, we aim during 2012-13 to do the following:
 * Define a short list key site performance metrics, including (but not limited to) average uncached article rendering times on a baseline of Featured Articles.
 * Make substantial improvements in key site metrics, including 75% decrease in article rendering times on Featured Article baseline.
 * Identify and analyze templates critical to site performance, working with the editor community to address performance issues in those templates.
 * Provide and promote accessible tools for improving performance of templates.

Rationale
It is a well-studied phenomenon that even small delays in response time (e.g half of a second) can result in sharp declines in web user retention. As a result, popular websites such as Google and Facebook invest heavily in site performance initiatives, and partially as a result, remain popular. Formerly popular sites (such as Friendster) suffered due to lack of attention to these issues. Wikipedia and its sister projects must remain usable and responsive in order for the movement to sustain its mission.

Over the years, we have prioritized the experience of the non-Editor users at the expense of the logged-in one. This made a lot of sense when operational and financial resources were tightly constrained and flagship websites had a similar preference for logged-out experience (news sites, shopping sites, blogging, etc.). Over the last 5+years, most Web 2.0 sites (Facebook, Twitter, etc.) would count only the logged-in Editor as a "user" and have optimized their experience to be more participatory.

During those same five years, our priority has created an experience which could be termed actively hostile to our editors and made it difficult to impossible for building participatory and engagement features build on Web 2.0 affordances. While a reader would be receiving content instantly from the caching layer, a logged-in user will need to receive that same content directly from an architecture not designed to support them. Similarly, features development is hampered by having to design-in UI, software architecture, caching, and operational considerations that are taken for granted on nearly any other web site.

For instance, currently, complicated and popular articles (e.g. "Barack Obama") often take 30 or more seconds to render when the cache is invalidated for an article (e.g. when the article is edited, or when an included template is edited). While article rendering is possibly an extreme example, we have several other pockets of our systems that have similar problems.

Our volunteer and paid developers have few tools to understand how their work impacts performance (for good or for bad). Furthermore, even editors have an impact on performance, and they have few tools to understand what that impact is.

This problem is compounded in that architectural design (both in software and operationally) was never considered as a whole to loosely couple these parts for scalability—each new feature added to the site has a corresponding slowdown in overall site performance, increase in operational requirement (new hardware), and corresponding operational complexity.

As one example, External Storage solves the data storage problem by partitioning the data storage for page text and associated information vertically (a dedicated machine group for each problem) and horizontally in time (older data lives on different machines than newer ones). This means the load/reliability characteristics are not even across machines within the partition (processing power on machines holding older articles sits almost completely unutilized), do not resemble other similar machines in other partitions (usage of page text and usage of user tables are different), and create bottlenecks in the system (all requests for a particular piece of information must go to particular machines). The net result is while this approach solves the problem, it treats each machine as a unique snowflake, making it increasingly more difficult (and more expensive) to support existing features or add to them.

Now imagine a situation where each new feature that targets the Editor Engagement problem runs across this end-to-end operational problem and unique performance consideration every time before a deploy with no way of knowing its impact (until it has a serious detrimental one). Moreover (until recently) there was no insight that any change had created that impact, and (still) there is no responsibility that couples the developer or editor's change to that impact, so that they could learn and improve the design through diligent practice. The loop is essentially unclosed on architectural and programming practice at the Foundation.

We need to invest in tools that make it possible for developers and editors to know what impact they are having, both so that we can accurately assess when a feature is creating a performance problem for us, and so that we can better understand the impact of our investment in performance. That will give us the visibility we need to address the most important issues, instead of relying on gut feel and lore to decide what is "good" or "bad" for site responsiveness. This will allow us to focus our effort on the most meaningful of improvements. And of course, we need to use this information to improve site performance.

The metrics we establish will help clarify our goals. We're already well aware of our worst performance area: article rendering for uncached articles. Since performance issues tend to be most pronounced on Featured Articles (which typically have lots of references and advanced use of templates, and are by definition the type of article we want more of), we plan to establish a cohort of Featured Articles to use as a baseline to measure rendering performance. We believe we can substantially improve performance in this area in the coming year. However, we don't want to focus exclusively on article rendering time, so we plan to establish other important metrics we will track and improve on.

We made some progress on performance in 2011-12. Asher Feldman deployed many performance measurement tools such as Graphite which have already helped us spot regressions. Tim Starling finished our disk-backed object cache project, which by one measure decreased average response time by 80-100 milliseconds. Tim also intends to make significant progress on introducing Lua as a new, faster template language alternative. However, neither Asher nor Tim have had the ability to focus sufficiently on performance to make the kind of progress that we need to make, since both play critical roles in the day-to-day operation of the website.

Team

 * Tim Starling (75%)
 * Asher Feldman (75%) - contingent on filling a new DBA role in Operations
 * 2011-12 hire: Potentially Technical Product Analyst (25%) to support Lua-related requirements analysis and community roll-out
 * New: Performance engineer (80%)
 * New: Dev-ops PM (25%)

Activities

 * Mediawiki improvements
 * Embedded Lua scripting support for MediaWiki
 * Apache CPU/memory utilization improvements (parsing, other PHP-intensive work)
 * Cache utilization
 * Perceived performance
 * Other software improvements
 * Remote services (search)
 * HipHop(VM) - contingent upon technology being ready for deployment
 * Operational improvements
 * Study I/O performance (Swift, NFS)
 * Optimize use of Squid/Varnish/other middleware
 * Tune network buffers
 * Turn up caching centers to bring data closer to users and reduce latency.
 * Deploy new technologies (e.g. Flash Drives, varnish)
 * Tools and measurement
 * Deploy tools for profiling, analysing and targeting
 * Tools for PHP developers
 * Tools for template authors

Outputs and outcomes
At the end of 2012-13, we would like to achieve the following:
 * Markedly better article rendering performance, rendering "slow" (>30 second) pages 4x faster with comparable functionality and editor workflow
 * More informed template authors with the tools necessary to avoid performance pitfalls and ability to keep page rendering time at acceptable levels.
 * More informed developers with the tools necessary to avoid performance pitfalls.
 * Reduce ping times from all worldwide locations to <150ms according to Watchmouse and site24x7.com. Reduce ping times to all European and North American locations to <80ms according to the above resources.

Interdependencies

 * Visual Editor / Parser team (Lua scripting, Parser performance)
 * TechOps (re-allocate existing hardware resources to support new layers)
 * Features/Editor Engagement (infrastructure and performance for notifications and messaging layer, approaches that improve development (sharding, memcache, etc.))
 * All of Tech (developer responsibility by closing the loop with performance tool usage)

Increasing contributions
Overall narrative note:

Upload is our first contribution feature. It will be completed for an experimental community trial by July. At that point we'll shift to experimenting with ways to engage casual users in multimedia contributions. This will interface and depend on the multimedia team that's proposed in the plan. The multimedia team will develop desktop focused curation tool, while the mobile team will develop mobile focused curation tools for multimedia.

The mobile focused curation tools may be our first microtask experiment on mobile devices. If we find that mobile multimedia contributions are not taking off, we will likely shift contribution efforts to other initiatives.

With regard to mobile editing, we are not making any assumptions about what forms of editing are likely to be used. However, all those assumptions require baseline support within the mobile infrastructure for text parsing and text manipulation. This is an infrastructure project that will likely not pay off immediately. We can target early text contribution efforts, such as block-level editing and new page creation, but ultimately our priorities will depend on where we see productive user adoption.

For microtasks, the mobile team will likely need to interface closely with the experimentation team, which already has a list of microtasks it would like to try, but will bias towards desktop experiments if we do not have proper orientation towards the mobile UI and APIs.

Goal

 * To facilitate contributions on mobile devices

Rationale

 * Our mobile page growth continues to be 5-15% every month but these users can't contribute. In order to reverse the trend of editor decline we need to capture new users coming online primarily (and sometimes only) on mobile devices
 * Board supports growth in areas that support mobile contributions

Resources

 * Existing Team (Phil, Patrick, Jon, Arthur, Lindsey, SDE)
 * 2012-13
 * 2 Front end engineers due to heavy user facing features
 * Yuvi (part time)

Activities

 * Photo Uploads
 * Commons continues to grow as a user community and mobile can help to accelerate and simplify media contributions.
 * Image Curation - If our mobile projects succeed then we'll have to address how were going to review the wealth of content coming into our projects.
 * Editing
 * We have to start supporting editing functionality on mobile devices. This is the key source of contribution and our mobile users can't be treated as second class contributors.
 * Micro Tasks - We need to reach out past edits if we want to tap into the full potential of mobile devices.
 * GPS
 * Article drafts
 * Actions on red links
 * Article Feedback
 * Watchlists
 * Tablet Support
 * Create a third proto type layout that is geared for large touch devices
 * Extend mobile visual editor work to tablets
 * On going app releases to reach a broader contributor base
 * Mobile Commons
 * Build a custom mobile experience for Commons to better attract contributions

Output

 * Mobile will finally provide its 2 billion pages views a month with a simple and easy set of contributory pipelines. Since mobile is seeing the biggest rise in readership it only makes sense to start funneling those users into contributors. This can immensly solve our editor retention problem.

Interdependencies

 * Visual Editor
 * Editor Engagement Team

Goal

 * Lower the global barrier for access to our projects by providing low cost and low tech solutions to access Wikipedia.

Rationale
Data charges and technological barriers should not impede access to our projects. There are easy ways that we can reach a significant amount of people if we are innovative with how they can access Wikipedia (through "Wikipedia Zero" partnerships, SMS/USSD access, S40 J2ME access, etc.).

Resources

 * 2011-12 hire: Partner Support Engineer (PSE)
 * New: Additional PSE to support double digit partner growth
 * Praekelt Foundation (contractor)
 * Emmanuel Engelhart (contractor)

Activities

 * Wikipedia Zero Partnerships
 * Vumi (SMS/USSD)
 * Reach millions of new users who don't have data plans
 * J2ME
 * Reach many billions more users who are not upgrading to smart phones

Cancelled/Deferred

 * OpenZim + PhoneGap
 * Support downloading of offline collections within the official Wikipedia app

Outputs

 * Broadending global reach
 * Capacity support for Zero build out

Ongoing

 * App maintenance, including J2ME app post-launch
 * Aggressive (3-5) partner launches per month for continued reach of new readers through Wikipedia Zero

Interdependencies

 * Operations support for all partner roll-outs
 * Tech Support Manager (Global Dev)
 * Global Development work in building and maintaining partnerships

Goal

 * Evolving the infrastructure that powers mobile

Rationale

 * Our mobile projects have been extremely successfull thus far but can't continue to scale at our growth rate unless we better integrate them into the core of MediaWiki, simplify our data sets, build a stronger API, and get better analytics. We have to merge the common functions of MobileFrontend into core so that we can work with non mobile developers to develop mobile solutions for our organizational reach goals.

Resources

 * Patrick
 * Arthur
 * Jon
 * Max
 * Phil
 * Brion (consulting)

Activities

 * API DONE
 * Extend for better data re-use DONE
 * Increase performance for a better user experience
 * Migrate to resource loader DONE
 * Remove the need to reparse page content
 * Open Street Maps
 * Deploy production service for internal use
 * Integrate into mobile web experience
 * GeoData/GPS
 * Deploy GeoData replacement to store GPS data for mobile re-use
 * Expand Mobile Analytics
 * Internationalization
 * Web fonts
 * Keymaps
 * Language Selection
 * Build out Mobile specific QA solutions

Cancelled/Deferred

 * Integrating MobileFrontend (MF) into core
 * Migrate away form WURFL to a better licensed solution

Output

 * Mobile will be a core part of MediaWiki
 * Developers outside of the mobile department will be able to easily develop mobile solutions
 * Decrease the time for each mobile project due to improved QA
 * Faster API due to optimizations
 * GPS read/write API

Interdependencies

 * Platform
 * Features
 * Analytics
 * i18n

Goal

 * To broaden the reach of the Wikimedia projects including reader and editor engagement by developing Mediawiki language support tools (i18n), developing translation tools for Wikimedia L10N communities, user testing with language community, collecting feedback, collaboratively working with other open source projects to grow our language support and developer groups.

Rationale

 * Wikimedia projects support 284 languages today with a community of translators and some tools. The i18n engineering team is developing tools for input methods, output methods, search, translations, supporting mobile and editor engagement tools such as visual editor; and is evangelizing usage of these tools in various language communities.

Resources

 * Alolita Sharma (engineering director/team manager)
 * Siebrand Mazeland (product manager)
 * Niklas Laxstrom (developer)
 * Santhosh Thottingal (developer)
 * Amir Aharoni (developer)
 * Srikanth Lakshmanan (outreach consultant, QA)
 * Pau Giner (user experience designer)
 * Arun Ganesh (user interface designer)
 * Opening (font designer)
 * Opening (developer)

Activities

 * Input methods / Onscreen keymaps
 * Output methods / WebFonts
 * Language settings/selection
 * Translation
 * Search
 * Dictionaries for translation tools, Wikisource
 * Mobile I18n support
 * Visual Editor I18n support/integration
 * Metrics/measurement statistics/impact assessment
 * Language support tool APIs (for 3rd party use)
 * Improve QA / testing
 * Incorporate community feedback loop for I18n tools
 * Improve RTL support

Output

 * Improved UI/UX experience for language tools
 * Improved i18n/L10N support for Visual Editor/Editor Engagement tools
 * Increased support for language IMEs (complete Indic language support, add other non-Roman language family support)
 * Increased support for language fonts/scripts (complete Indic language support, add other non-Roman language family support)
 * Increased support for translations (tools development, APIs)

Ongoing

 * Educate developers about proper internationalisation practices
 * Add free and open fonts / script support for more languages
 * Add input methods for more languages

Interdependencies

 * Product support (Product team)
 * UI/UX support (Product team)
 * QA (Platform team)
 * Labs (Tech Ops team)

Key Goals

 * Data Services Platform &mdash; Construct a compute cluster to store, analyze, and query all incoming data of interest to the community, including traffic data, application instrumentation, and edit/editor data.
 * Intelligence for Institutional Goals &mdash; Intermediate solutions for:
 * Supporting the new Editor Engagement Experiments team
 * Editors by Geography
 * Pageviews by Mobile Carrier
 * Instrumentation: WMF Mobile apps, Click Tracking, RevTagging (Account Creation, Edits)
 * Improvements to the high-level metrics Report Card

Rationale
The Wiki Movement has a chronic need for analytics. We need it to understand our editors, to encourage growth, to engender diversity, to focus our resources, to improve our engineering efforts, and to measure our success. It permeates nearly all our goals, yet our current analytics capabilities are underdeveloped: we lack infrastructure to capture editor, visitor, clickstream, and device data in a way that is easily accessible; our efforts are distributed among different departments; our data is fragmented over different systems and databases; our tools are ad-hoc.

Rather than merely improve existing jobs and data pipelines, the Analytics Team aims to construct a Data Services Platform capable of mining intelligence from all datastreams of interest, providing this insight in real time, and exposing it via an API to power applications, mash up into websites, and stream to devices.

Planning Documents

 * Analytics/2012-2013 Roadmap
 * Analytics/2012-2013 Roadmap/Hardware

Team

 * Product Manager: Diederik van Liere
 * Engineers: David Schoonover, Andrew Otto.

Interdependencies

 * Biggest unknown is the availability of hardware. This planning assumes that the 10 node cluster is available from April 1, and subsequent hardware is available from August 1st.
 * Significant work with ops in migrating the cluster from pre-production setup to production use
 * Close work with data consumers in and outside of the Foundation to ensure solutions meet their needs

Goal statement
There are three main goals for the Fundraising engineering team:
 * To maintain and improve donation pipeline reliability
 * To improve privacy and security compliance
 * Provide fundraising team with better analytics they need to reach the Foundation’s fundraising goals.

Rationale
Fundraising is the source to the rest of Wikimedia's sink.

Team

 * Katie Horn- Technical Lead
 * Jeremy P. - Fundraising Engineer
 * Jeff Green (50%) - Operations Engineer
 * 2011-12 hire: Software Developer (Front-end)
 * 2011-12 hire: Software Developer (Back-end)
 * (non-Engineering, Peter Gehres - Fundraiser Production)

[ current system resources allocation to be provided by ops above (migration from EQIAD) ]

Activities

 * Maintain all pieces of the current donation pipeline
 * DonationInterface extension
 * Anti-fraud measures
 * Additional payment gateways
 * Maintain integration with third parties
 * Ensure security (in progress)
 * Improve redundancy and logging to aid in the event of unforeseen circumstances
 * CentralNotice extension
 * FundraiserStatistics extension
 * FundraiserLandingPage extension
 * ContributionTracking extension
 * CiviCRM (customer relationship database) maintenance and improvements for bare usability. Currently there are major bugs and scalability issues that WMF has run up against.
 * ActiveMQ (queuing)
 * Research into alternatives for ActiveMQ
 * Code changes in most other parts of the pipeline when we find one
 * Improvements to reliability of donation pipeline
 * CentralNotice extension: needs better A/B testing support within the same geolocation bucket
 * Third-party service automatic health check system
 * Upgrade payments cluster to more recent version of MediaWiki (try to keep it near-ish to the version on the cluster
 * Code coverage (unit tests)
 * Documentation of the existing systems.
 * Bulk mailing infrastructure (CiviCRM can't handle it, current structure was done with ad hoc scripts)
 * Greater level of PCI (Data privacy and security) compliance
 * Analytics and reporting:
 * Improve the current analytics system to allow for real-time reporting as well as increase scalability, security and transparency
 * Donation auditing - Many numbers are required by finance and global dev throughout the year. Tools that exist to get these numbers must be written and maintained.
 * Improve the methods used to build "missing" data from our payment processors, logs, and contribution tracking data.

Outputs and outcomes

 * Payment metrics
 * New payment methods
 * Additional payment processors (required for some new payment methods as well as redundancy)
 * Redundant payments clusters between pmtpa and eqiad with failover
 * CiviCRM metrics
 * If it is still running without crashing or frustating business (too much).
 * Higher certifications level measures PCI compliance
 * Code coverage for testing is measureable against the total code base
 * Payments cluster version lag versus current MediaWiki is currently 2 behind 1.19.
 * Better caching configuration for donatewiki
 * Health and Alert System for health (or lack thereof) of the pipeline for high-traffic times, capable of notifying us when immediate action is necessary
 * API for CentralNotice allowing for automated checking of banner allocations and alerts
 * Automated disabling of payment methods for down payment processors (currently very time consuming and error-prone)
 * Selenium testing for banners and landing pages to ensure that changes to templates and JavaScript do not have negative effects
 * Improved transparency to donors with regard to donations and other fundraiser metrics
 * Improved analytics system that allows fundraising creative and production teams to iterate rapidly with near real-time information
 * Fix CiviCRM or improve mass-mailing infrastructure to send emails to current and past donors

Interdependencies
The fundraising tech team works closely with the fundraising production and fundraising creative teams that are part of the Community Department. The team also works with LCA to ensure compliance with various privacy policies, execution of contracts with payment providers, as well as community support.

Any security engineer that we hire will work closely with the FR-tech team to ensure that our systems are secure.

Analytics - There is currently nobody dedicated to fundraiser analytics.

Rationale
The MediaWiki software at the heart of our software infrastructure needs continuous modernization in order to support our ambitious initiatives and in order to improve site stability.

In 2012-13, there are core technologies need to support new innovation. We need support for new MediaWiki revision types and some level of data transclusion to support Wikimedia Deutschland's Wikidata effort. A number of parts of the core software will need to be reworked in order to support flexible methods of user notifications. OAuth will allow users the ability to securely grant new tools the ability to take actions on their behalf (such as transfer images from other websites), without needing to share their password with anyone.

Our software also needs many improvements to increase our operational efficiency and stabilize our infrastructure. The way we configure our software (global variables) hasn't changed since the very early days of the project, despite enormous problems in maintainabilty, ability to test components, and ability to flexibly configure our systems. We require shell access (and often staff time) to configure many things that site admins should be empowered to change. We need to more fully support our new ability to serve from multiple datacenters, by making it possible to seamlessly switch between data centers without noticable glitches (such as loss of session data). We need to continue to improve MediaWiki's ability to handle different storage techniques such as Swift, so that we can expand our media storage, remove upload limits, and prevent the imminent exhaustion of our existing media storage. Our search infrastructure also needs improvement.

Team

 * Aaron Schulz (80%)
 * Chad Horohoe (40%)
 * Chris Steipp (40%)
 * New: Senior Software Engineer (80%)
 * Sam Reed (20%) - Wikidata support

Activities

 * Support notifications framework development (see editor engagement)
 * MediaWiki core features for Wikidata
 * Media types on revisions
 * Raw data transclusion
 * Other core architecture work
 * Configuration database - Revamp our configuration management storage - remove global variables, stop proliferation of new ones, provide extensions means of not adding to technical debt, expand unit-testability
 * Media infrastructure - file storage improvements, limitation removal, and maintenance; transcoding support infrastructure
 * Search maintenance and incremental improvements to MediaWiki/Lucene interchange layer.
 * Support additional protection level for the MediaWiki: namespace
 * Replicated session handling
 * OAuth/OpenID - possible work on AcademicAccess

Goal
Ensure development is efficient, code is deployed rapidly, and volunteer contribution is integrated efficiently.

Rationale
In 2010-11, we only managed one deployment of MediaWiki (1.17) to the cluster, and that deployment took a couple of attempts. In 2011-12, we implemented Heterogeneous Deploy support in our tools, which let us roll out 1.18 and 1.19 in a gradual way. We also switched our version control system from Subversion to Git, and switched our review process to pre-commit reviews. As of this writing, we haven't yet deployed out of Git, but we're already having serious conversations about a bi-weekly deployment process. We also carved out 20% of our overall development capacity for code review and general community-reported bugfixing.

In 2012-13, we need to continue to invest in this area. While we believe that Git represents a net positive for us, there have been significant regressions in productivity from Subversion (such as code review tooling), which need to be addressed. While we made a modest increase in our deployment frequency in the last fiscal year, we get significant value from deploying far more frequently.

We need to do this while also supporting ongoing operational needs of the site and supporting our development and editing communities. We also need to be proactive in training new developers in the best practices for secure software development.

Team

 * Sam Reed (80%)
 * Chad Horohoe (60%)
 * Chris Steipp (60%)
 * All engineering staff (20%)

Activities

 * Ongoing activities
 * Continued code maintenance and review of new changes
 * MediaWiki release management and installer maintenance (2 tarball releases per year)
 * Shell bug requests and MediaWiki-specific operations support
 * Support for outside initiatives (e.g. Wikidata)
 * Security bugfixes and emergency releases
 * Large reviews (security, performance, architecture) of new system components
 * Developer training
 * Manage 20% time and other ways to keep code review in check
 * Git and Gerrit
 * Github integration - mirroring to Github, Gitorious and other services, and integrating pull requests into our workflow
 * Usability improvements to get us back to parity with old CodeReview extension
 * Replace "scap" deployment tool
 * Current tool is fragile. Errors get lost in sea of useless warnings, and pushes can leave cluster in inconsistent state.  With far more frequent deployments, we need a far more robust tool.

Outputs and outcomes

 * At least monthly deployments of new MediaWiki revisions
 * Review queue for core and deployed extensions
 * Never exceed 200 completely unreviewed requests, nothing older than a week
 * Make a final decision on all changes, large or small, within a month at most
 * Backlog of no more than 50 open shell bugs at any given time
 * Quarterly security training, along with quality online video material

Goal
Our goal with our Quality Assurance activity is to accurately assess the quality of new software (and address major problems) prior to imposing that software on editors and readers of our site.

Rationale
In 2011-12, Wikimedia Foundation established a beginning for quality assurance activities. We hired Chris McMahon as our QA Lead, and brought in Antoine Musso to help with our test automation infrastructure. We also have a Bugmeister who helps prioritize and assign the bugs submitted through our public bug tracker.

We don't believe our current hiring is sufficient. WMF today has 22 full time developers and approximately 20 more part time or contract developers, in addition to a large contingent of volunteer developers. While there is no standard ratio of developers to testers, and that ratio varies widely across the software development landscape, one commonly quoted figure in practice in the industry is three developers to one tester. Unfortunately, we can't afford that luxury, so we're going to have to be very strategic about the hiring we do in this area.

In 2012-13, we plan to dedicate resources to streamlining test automation, rallying community support for test efforts, providing infrastructure for better developer collaboration with testers, and providing burst testing capacity when needed. This all will help ensure that our site remains stable.

This has a significant dependency on our "Wikimedia technical community" efforts to recruit and retain a robust testing community.

Team

 * Chris McMahon (85%)
 * Antoine Musso (80%)
 * 2011-12 hire: Bugmeister (100%)
 * New: QA Engineer (100%)
 * Contractor budget

Activities

 * Test automation
 * API
 * Desktop browser-based UI automation (e.g. Selenium, TestSwarm)
 * Mobile automated testing (emulation/on-device)
 * Unit testing/CI/phpUnit/QUnit
 * Public manual test environment
 * Beta Labs
 * Labs instances for feature development
 * Community testing/Crowdsourcing
 * Building volunteer base through tester recruitment, bug bashes, etc (see Wikimedia technical community)
 * Crowdsourcing services
 * Test documentation and management
 * Test plan writing
 * Test plan standards/cleanup and oversight
 * Doc improvements - Install, automated suite docs, labs, etc.
 * Manual testing
 * Supporting the MediaWiki release cycle
 * Cross browser testing
 * Editor engagement features, i18n, Mobile device Core maintenance/misc, multimedia)
 * Manage contractor capacity, especially when burst activity is needed.

Interdependencies

 * Volunteer QA Coordinator
 * Bugmeister
 * Possible operational impact from Selenium test automation

Wikimedia technical community
We aim to support volunteers and companies/orgs who work on Wikimedia technology, enable them to achieve more with each other and with WMF, and (when possible) align them with Wikimedia movement goals (especially new editor engagement and the visual editor).

Our volunteer encouragement, mentoring, and alignment “funnels” have holes at different various points for operations, documentation/project management, testing/bug reporting/bug triage (QA), and software development activities. We have a steady stream of new software developers interested in joining MediaWiki development and of new system administrators interested in using Wikimedia Labs. However, we are not as strong at finding or coordinating project management or QA activities, at mentoring the new developers, or providing a compelling and usable development environment in Wikimedia Labs that helps sysadmins and developers more easily write, test, and puppetize their changes. We have also identified the strategic weak points in these processes and aim to strengthen them.

Given that, we aim to reduce our emphasis on initial software development outreach and to improve our mentorship of the existing development community, except in partnering with Global Development and local organizations where we have a strong interest in growing the local Wikimedia community (Brazil and India). We instead aim to support staff and volunteers in mentoring developer volunteers who come in via existing intake processes. And we will partner with QA and with Ops to strengthen our volunteering pipelines in those areas.

The imbalance in our technical community leans strongly towards development and lacks systematic testing. While the QA team and MediaWiki platform developers are going to automate what testing can be automated, there is simply no adequate substitute for trained manual testers to find bugs and assure the quality of our service. Since we cannot afford to hire many testers, we are choosing to hire a volunteer QA coordinator to train and lead unpaid testers as a key strategy of our QA efforts.

Rationale
With more and better focused technical volunteers, we can do more work towards Wikimedia movement goals.

Team

 * Sumana Harihareswara: 100% as engineering community manager
 * Bug Wrangler: 50%
 * Guillaume Paumier: 100% as Technical Communications Manager
 * New: Technical Event Manager: 100%
 * New: Volunteer QA Coordinator: 100%
 * For mobile outreach:
 * Tomasz Finc
 * Potentially mobile community liaison (contractor)

Activities

 * General engineering communications, infrastructure and mentorship
 * Technical communication from engineering
 * Patch review, extensions review, and code review facilitation
 * Mentorship/training programs (UCOSP, GSoC)
 * Process/product improvements in Git workflow and Labs environment
 * Events
 * In-person developer outreach events (tutorials)
 * In-person developer inreach events (expert collaboration)
 * Encouraging small regional events
 * QA support
 * Bug squad formation and leadership
 * QA training
 * MediaWiki documentation
 * Strategic collaboration with other large orgs and communities; developer engagement/evangelism
 * Teaching/leading interested nontechnical activists to do product management work

Outputs & outcomes

 * Software development volunteering
 * Currently: Software developers can contribute but sometimes wait for weeks or months before seeing their changes merged; new volunteers don't get aligned to movement priorities.
 * Goal: Facilitate the intake and growth of volunteer developers and their ability to contribute software, and align them to the movement priorities. All new changesets from volunteers get an initial comment within one week of the merge request.


 * Ops volunteering
 * Currently: We have very few volunteers who can lead system administration projects or contribute to ops.
 * Goal: Many people can puppetize packages, and do so. They don’t need to whine as much to get things done.


 * Engineering project documentation and product management volunteering
 * Currently: A few volunteers make occasional edits to update project documentation, or make efforts to write specs, gather feature requirements, or do other product management work.
 * Goal: There is a team of on-call documenters, and multiple volunteers reliably update documentation about projects they care about. At least one volunteer consistently contributes to product management work.


 * MediaWiki documentation volunteering
 * Currently: sparse, uncoordinated documentation on the MediaWiki software, with occasional uncoordinated updates
 * Goal: a team of on-call MediaWiki documenters who can sprint on specific areas, and up-to-date documentation for the MediaWiki API and for the extensions that Wikimedia Foundation deploys


 * QA volunteering
 * Currently: many people find bugs and report bugs, but we have no systematic volunteer testing and nearly no systematic bug triage by volunteers.
 * Goal: A test squad of good testers whom we can call upon to test at particular moments or on particular components/tools and provide good bug reports, so we can do strategic outreach, and a bug squad of good bug triageurs who continuously triage bugs. Ongoing training to improve testers' and triageurs' skills.

Interdependencies

 * Ryan Lane as Wikimedia Labs technical lead and Platform Engineering's DevOps Program Manager: assistance in Labs
 * QA Lead and Volunteer QA Coordinator: assistance in QA
 * Platform Engineering: assistance with Git/Gerrit/developer platform and workflow
 * Chris McMahon as QA Lead
 * Analytics team for possible community metrics