Wikimedia Engineering/2015-16 Q3 Goals

Purpose of this document: Goals for the Wikimedia Engineering and Product Development department, for the third quarter of fiscal year 2015–16 (1 January 2016 – 31 March 2016). The goal setting process owner in each section is the person responsible for coordinating completion of the section, in partnership with the team and relevant stakeholders.

Status fields can use the following templates:, , ❌, ✅ or

= Product =

Discovery
We build the anonymous path of discovery to a trusted and relevant source of knowledge.

Our focus will be on building on-top of our anonymous and trusted search stack to improve relevancy, expose additional content and leverage locally relevant knowledge.

The below goals are close-to-final draft for the Q3 goals for the team. They are listed here for transparency and public comment. Please note that the below proposals are not goals which have been committed to at this stage.

Goal setting process owner: Dan Garry

Analysis
In addition to the below goals, the Discovery Department's Analysis Team supports the rest of the Discovery Department with experimental design, data collection, and data analysis. As this is an ongoing support function, it is not represented in the list of goals below.

Editing
Goal setting process owner: User:Trevor Parscal (WMF)

The Editing Department build collaborative, inclusive tools for creating and editing free knowledge.

Fundraising Tech
Goal setting process owner: User:AGomez_(WMF), User:Khorn_(WMF)

Reading
Below is a draft!

Additional iOS app notes
Continue to work on improving the retention rates for the app, and encourage repeat app usage with new experimental features. Particularly by implementing some user notifications. Initial notes on notification concepts here.

Additional Web notes
Aside from above goals, will support Android's efforts on Gather and hope to push 'read more' from beta into stable on as many wikis as possible.

Strategic tests
Reading strategic test work and research, such as a redirection test (relates to contemporary UX), is planned to be conducted in parallel with the items in tables above.

= Technology =

Architecture
Goal-setting process owner:  Rob Lanphier

Analytics
Goal setting process owner: Nuria Ruiz, Kevin Leduc

Feedback can be sent to analytics@lists.wikimedia.org (public e-mail list)

Release Engineering
Goal setting process owner: Greg Grossmeier

Services
Goal setting process owner: Gabriel Wicke

On phabricator: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T118868

Technical Operations
Goal setting process owner: User:Mark Bergsma (WMF)

Performance
Goal-setting process owner: Ori Livneh

Speed is Wikipedia's killer feature. ("Wiki" means "quick" in Hawaiian.) As the Wikimedia Foundation’s Performance team, we want to create value for readers and editors by making it possible to retrieve and render content at the speed of thought, from anywhere in the world, on the broadest range of devices and connection profiles.

The current primary focus of the team is availability.

Like many web applications of its class, MediaWiki was not designed from the outset to be a distributed system. The features that make MediaWiki reliable and scalable were typically developed in response to pressure generated by the growth of Wikipedia. As a result, although Wikimedia has multiple data centers across the globe, MediaWiki is only running on one of them at any given moment. The result is that users around the world who have access to culture and knowledge that is currently underrepresented in Wikipedia are hit with very high latency whenever they try to contribute. We want to fix that.

The following is a summary of the Performance Team Goals.

Research
In Wikimedia Research we use qualitative and quantitative methods to provide strategic insights and technological solutions to the movement and the Foundation, to foster innovation and to inform the development of new products.

Design Research
Goal setting process owner: Abbey Ripstra

Security
Goal setting process owner: CSteipp (WMF)

We make life hard for the people who want to harm our sites or the people that use them.