Wikimedia Engineering/Maps & Geo Team

= Proposal =

Throughout the last number of years the question of Maps and Wikimedia has come up multiple times but has gotten little traction due to lack of staff resourcing. This proposal focuses on building and staffing a team of engineers and operations staff members to support a product pipeline of map and geospatial features.

= Background = While the foundation has made small strides in learning more about maps through initiatives like the Wiki Loves Monuments App and Special:Nearby the velocity of progress has always been limited by a lack of operations and engineering support to provide a strong and supported maps foundation. For instance, the build out of infrastructure support for OpenStreetMap has been slow and haphazard not simply due to the complexity but mostly due to priorities shifting within various teams and no one having enough time to focus on maps.

= Team = To remedy this I propose building a Maps and Geo team incubated within the Mobile Department that would have 4x engineers, 1x operations staff member, 1x community liaison, and 1x product manager. These roles may live within mobile or be matrixed into mobile if they are 100% dedicated to Maps and Geo work. This engineering team would live within Mobile as they would work very closely with the Mobile Web & App teams at first in order support their initial product work but would serve as an infrastructure team that would eventually build maps and geo functional for the organization at large across handset, tablet, and desktop. The mobile team has expressed the most amount of interest and drive for this work and the department is in a good place to absorb additional growth due to its Agile practices.

2 Engineers
The main focus for a two person engineering team is to create a stable infrastructure and do a basic triage on existing tools


 * Building and maintaing a production tile service that supports Mobile Apps, Web, Multimedia & Community Development
 * Scale the service to work at Wikipedia traffic levels and third party use
 * Take *some* action on maps and geo technical debt
 * Update geohack to function within Wikipedia rather then a third part site
 * Update WikiMiniAtlas to be supported by internal tile service
 * Currently maps are slow and don't even load consistently
 * Update synthetic maps like File:California_county_map to be easily creatable
 * Build and support storage for tile service
 * Supporting an OSM Database for tool server developers

4 Engineers
A four person team will be able to focus on the above plus they will have the capacity to develope new features and extend to other teams
 * Create custom tile sets in collaboration with MapBox and Stamen design
 * Creating navigable maps within Articles using tile rendering service
 * Create a map and location based navigation model for Wikipedia to augment search
 * Work with WMF engineering teams like Mobile and Multimedia to extend Maps and Geo functionality
 * Collaborate with Wikimaps project to easily allow spatial map creation
 * Create workflows to add GPS coordinates for articles that don't have them
 * Evolve Special:Nearyby for desktop and mobile users
 * Increasing the amount of Wikidata contributions
 * Increasing the amount of GEO-tagged coordinates in the Global South

= Outcome = As our mobile page-views continue to climb Wikipedia will be more and more present within the physical world. Not having maps will create an inferior product that doesn’t deliver the rich educational experience that we need to be showing. Instead we should focus our efforts at staffing this initiative and pairing it across Mobile, Multimedia, and others in order to capture the wealth of contributions and use that this will have.