Wikimedia Product

This page reflects the work done by the Wikimedia Product group. Wikimedia Product staff employed by the Wikimedia Foundation build, improve and maintain the features of Wikimedia sites.

Monthly Product Showcase
Members of Discovery, Editing and Reading teams show off new work and experiments.

Recent: January 19, 2016

Recent: December 14, 2015 (YouTube | WebM on Commons)

Recent: November 16, 2015 (Watch the showcase)

Recent: October 28, 2015 (Watch the showcase)

Community Wishlist Survey
The Community Tech team invited all Wikimedia contributors to submit proposals in a Community Wishlist Survey. The survey ran from the 9th through the 22nd of November. Voting on proposals occurred from Nov 30–Dec 14. The current tasks accepted for 2016 are - Migrate dead links to Wayback Machine (T120433), Improved diff compare screen (T121469), Central Global Repository for Templates, Lua modules, and Gadgets (T121470), Cross-wiki watchlist (T5525), Numerical sorting (T8948), Allow categories in Commons in all languages (T120451), Pageview Stats tool (T120497), Global (cross-wiki) user talk page (T88416), Improve the “copy and paste detection” bot (T120435), Add a user watchlist (T2470). To see the full list go to the 2015 Community Wishlist Survey/Results page.

Product Development
There are a few current efforts underway to help solve some long standing challenges around product.
 * A high level product development process is open in draft for discussion.
 * Team Practices Group is leading a more detailed effort to restructure how the WMF plans and executes software engineering, known as the SPDPP (Software Product Development Process Proposal). Engineering, Product departments and the Team Practices group, will contribute to this draft as it evolves. Team Practices Group also leads ongoing projects to measure what fraction of team effort is dedicated to maintenance and to promote burnup charts for documenting team progress.
 * The Design research team is also working on gathering feedback around product lifecycle and has created a site and will provide feedback to help support this process.
 * Community Engagement is working with the teams to develop a set of Design and Development Principles. First draft is up here.
 * The current roadmaps and development are provided comprehensively with the technology teams.  Individual audiences are also provided below.

Wikimedia Developer Summit 2016
All teams had their respective leads, product managers and engineers participating. There is a breakdown of sessions provided. The core focus areas were: Content format (T119022), Content access and APIs (T119029), Collaboration (T119030), Software engineering (T119032) and User interface presentation (T119162). Also check out the full phabracator board for the summit. Special thanks and shout of appreciation to Quim Gil, Rachel Farrand and Rob Lanphier for a great event.

Strategy
As of late 2015/early 2016, the product group is working to define its strategy.

Discovery
We build the anonymous path of discovery to a trusted and relevant source of knowledge.
 * Discovery Page: Discovery
 * Discovery Lead: Tomasz Finc
 * Phabricator task board: #discovery
 * Discovery Projects: Maps, Search, Wikidata Query Service

Updates

 * Q3 goals are up on Wikimedia Engineering/2015-16 Q3 Goals#Discovery
 * We're still collecting feedback on the completion suggester beta feature. Please try it out and leave us your thoughts.
 * Portal A/B test was relaunched in January.

Updates – February, 2016

 * Portal team is planning and running more A/B tests. Also, we are exploring options to graduate successful tests on to production.
 * A popularity score based on page views has been loaded into the production elasticsearch cluster for use in improving search relevance. First tests will be run with the completion suggester which is currently a beta feature

Review for 2015

The Discovery team launched this year with a data dashboard showing search, api, and feature usage. Two new services were launched into limited production, Wikidata Query Service and a new map tile service which is gaining increasing usage and now apart of the android app. They launched the beta of a better search Completion Suggester geared towards improving relevancy. The search api was documented and efforts to gain a better understanding of usage on the portal to Wikipedia were also launched this year.

Goals

 * Q1: July - September 2015 (WMF Q1 Review)
 * Q2: October - December 2015 (WMF Q2 Review)
 * Q3: January - March 2016
 * Q4: April - June 2016

Editing
We build collaborative, inclusive tools for creating and editing free knowledge.
 * Editing page: Editing
 * Editing head: Trevor Parscal
 * Phabricator task boards: #Editing; #Collaboration-Team-Current, #ContentTranslation-Release7, Multimedia, #Parsoid, #VisualEditor
 * Editing teams: Collaboration, Multimedia, Languages, Parsing, VisualEditor

Updates
Review for 2015
 * Collaboration
 * [On track] Beta Feature release of cross-wiki notifications for all wikis
 * [Delayed] LiquidThreads → Flow conversion on remaining wikis is mostly complete but stalled; this will complete major work removing LQT from production.
 * Language
 * [New] Nice summary on Content Translation Tool Design by Pau Giner.
 * [New] Monthly Report for December 2015
 * Multimedia
 * [On track] Experimental improved multimedia editing workflow is being prototyped with non-destructive image editing – see demo.
 * [On track] Improve information collection and funnel analysis about the upload pipeline.
 * [Additional] Working on improved in-edit upload workflow testing with users to motivate better behaviour.
 * Parsing
 * [On track] Experimental work to add an extension registration system for Parsoid is underway.
 * VisualEditor
 * [On track] Deploy the single-edit tab interface for the visual editor for all users on several Wikipedias
 * [Pending] Provide the visual editor as the non-default editor for anonymous users on single-edit-tab interface wikis where not the primary editor
 * [Pending] Run an A/B test on the English Wikipedia of providing the visual editor as the default editor for anonymous users on single-edit-tab interfaces
 * Q3: January - March 2016 goals are posted on MediaWiki.org

The Editing team launched VisualEditor to more users and continued to improve. VisualEditor is available for new accounts on the English Wikipedia and logged-in users on the Spanish Wikipedia. Auto-citations, editor switching, math extensions, upload enhancements, graph editing and improved performance were also improvements in VisualEditor this year. Exploration began on mobile editing as well. The Content Translation tool has seen solid growth and been well received. Over 40,000 new translated articles have been created. Article suggestions was recently added to the experience. Flow was released to beta and continues to be tested by many users. Echo notifications experience received enhancements and the ability to do cross-wiki notifications will be a beta early next year. Parsoid has experienced improvements in html size and improvements in performance.

Goals

 * Q1: July - September 2015 (WMF Q1 Review)
 * Q2: October - December 2015 (WMF Q2 Review)
 * Q3: January - March 2016
 * Q4: April - June 2016

Fundraising Tech
Technical work supporting the Wikimedia Foundation's fundraising efforts.
 * Fundraising Tech Page: Fundraising tech
 * Fundraising Tech Lead: Katie Horn
 * Phabricator task board: #wmf-fr

Updates
Review for 2015
 * [COMPLETE] Support Big English fundraiser
 * Q3: January - March 2016 goals posted for review on Mediawiki.

The Fundraising Tech team continued to evolve their work supporting French and English fundraisers. They provided updates to Amazon payments, PCI gap analysis and improvements. A new Banner History feature in CentralNotice was also completed and provides the team with better tooling to understand banner performance.

Goals

 * Q1: July - September 2015, Quarterly Review
 * Q2: October - December 2015
 * Q3: January - March 2016
 * Q4: April - June 2016

Reading
We build exceptional learning and reading experiences for the sum of all knowledge.
 * Reading Page: Reading
 * Reading Lead: Toby Negrin
 * Phabricator task board: #reading
 * Reading Projects: Community Tech, Mobile Apps, Desktop & Mobile Web, Reading Infrastructure

Updates
Review for 2015
 * Android
 * Android App Beta Update
 * Fix Wiktionary lookup and temporary outage.
 * Fix UI for nonexistent pages.
 * Various improvements to the networking layer and stability.
 * iOS
 * Another App beta released; Production Release ETA End of February
 * General bugfixes, RTL issues, fit and finish
 * Team at work integrating trending articles into feed
 * 3 Community contributors!
 * Web
 * Decision meeting on Gather next week
 * Team focused on performance improvements
 * Infrastructure
 * Working with TechOps and Release Engineering on SessionManager release
 * Removing SessionManager patches from current release for additional testing

The Reading team completed its strategy process and focused on reaching new readers in emerging countries and updating experiences for our existing readers. The Web team worked with the performance team to reduce page load time for the mobile web which will improve the experiences of readers around the world but particularly in Asia, Africa and South America. The team will present their vision for a new services based low latency infrastructure at the Developer Summit in January and is partnering with Design Research, Advancement and Comms on ethnographic reader research in Mexico in February. The Android app team’s focus on features was recognized in the Google Play store and as a 2015 app of the year. Android has seen some nice additions including improved tabbed browsing, language switching, link preview and a map view (using Discovery’s new tile server) for the nearby feature. We’re looking forward to more social features in 2016. The iOS app included some nice improvements early in the year with Share a Fact, a clean design with short descriptors, a prominently displayed image at the top of each article, improved search functionality, a read more section, and an enhanced image viewer. The next major release of iOS is in beta and will roll out a new version early next year. The update to the app includes simplified navigation, more conventional look and feel and a new feed interface which allow Wikipedia to tell you when there’s something you should know. The Reading Infrastructure team created a dashboard for measuring the impact of their efforts to modernize MediaWiki authentication system (AuthManager), measured MediaWiki API usage, and data dump loads, made api and performance improvements. Two factor authentication will be the first service on the the AuthManager architecture and should land in early 2016. The Community Tech team launched the first Community Wishlist Survey for WMF. The process generated over 100 community driven feature requests and lots of positive feedback. The entire Reading team is looking forward to delivering more reader and community requested features in 2016.

Goals

 * Q1: July - September 2015 (WMF Q1 Review)
 * Q2: October - December 2015 (WMF Q2 Review)
 * Q3: January - March 2016
 * Q4: April - June 2016