Community prototyping/status

Last update on: 2012-12-monthly

2011-03-01
In February, the Community and Tech departments started a joint experiment in which engineers are working even more closely with Community department staff. Developers are "embedded" in the Community department, to try out a more agile way to prototype features. Trevor Parscal started in this role in February, and will continue in March. In February, Alolita Sharma and Brandon Harris also provided some support to the Outreach team, by discussing A/B testing requirements with Frank Schulenburg & Lennart Guldbrandsson.

2011-04-01
As the first engineer "embedded" in the Community department, Trevor Parscal completed the first experiment, related to the location and appearance of the edit link. The results are not available yet, but will be published in the coming weeks. He's now turning to the account creation improvement project (and the associated A/B testing) with Frank Schulenburg & Lennart Guldbrandsson. Nimish Gautam and Roan Kattouw also provided support for the A/B testing and deployment respectively.

2011-05-01
Trevor Parscal continued to work with the Community department team in early April on the experiment to see the impact of a design and location change of the section edit button.

2012-12-monthly
In December, active development has begun on the user metrics API project in E3. The effort is threefold: to standardize user metrics [1], to build infrastructure to efficiently compute metrics for a large set of users [2,3], and finally to expose those results via an API. The technical portion of this project is written in Python and Flask, and the assigned resources are Dario Taraborelli and Ryan Faulkner. Development and documentation efforts will be continuing through January.

[1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Metrics

[2] https://github.com/rfaulkner/E3_analysis

[3] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/gitweb?p=analytics/E3Analysis.git;a=summary