Editor Engagement/2013 strategy planning (Features)

This is a strategy planning space for the Editor Engagement Features team for the Wikimedia Foundation's 2013-2014 fiscal year (July 2013-June 2014).

For convenience, this page also includes current plans for the last quarter of the 2012-2013 fiscal year (Q4: April-June 2013).

Goals
Our overall goal for 2013-2014 is to help reverse Wikipedia's editor decline by building features that can help recruit new editors and retain existing editors.

To that end, we are working on these key milestones for the coming year:

Notifications (Echo):
 * Complete and deploy core features (Q4)
 * Deploy Echo on non-English Wikipedias and other projects (Q1)
 * Develop cross-wiki and a few key features (Q2)
 * Support mobile and multimedia teams, as well as third-party developers

Flow (Messaging/Discussions):
 * Discuss prototypes and plans for user-to-user messaging on talk pages (Q4)
 * First experimental release of user-to-user messaging (Q1: meta, en-wiki)
 * Full production release of user-to-user messaging (Q2: meta, en-wiki, other language?)
 * More languages + projects soon after the initial release (Q3)
 * Visible progress for article talk + subscriptions framework on Wikipedia (Q4)

Article Feedback v5:
 * Complete and deploy final features (Q4)
 * Help projects evaluate the tool, participate in community discussions (Q1)
 * Support wider deployments on more projects (as needed)

An overall timeline for E2 feature development in 2013 is shown on the right, for discussion purposes. This timeline is approximate and subject to change, as our plans get periodically adjusted.

Each project's roadmap is provided with more details in the sections below, as well as in these slides.

Echo (Notifications)


This quarter (Q4: April-June 2013)
 * fix bugs + critical feature tweaks (as needed)
 * develop a few more features (e.g. HTML Email, flyout links, thanks)
 * plan next steps, estimate maintenance + i18n support
 * deploy on Meta (to prepare for other language wikis)

Next quarter (Q1: July-September 2013)
 * deploy on other language wikis (e.g.: French, German, etc.)
 * fix more bugs + critical features (as needed, prioritized by urgency)
 * provide mobile notifications (in collaboration with mobile team)
 * prepare for cross-wiki notifications (limited site-to-site notices)

Following quarter (Q2: October-December 2013, as time and resources allow)
 * deploy cross-wiki notifications (better site-to-site notices)
 * develop file notifications, deploy on Commons (multimedia team)
 * provide third-party tools + guidelines (with community engineering team?)

Notification tasks under consideration are detailed in this spreadsheet and estimates are summarized in this overview. See also our feature requirements, the testing page or the metrics plan for more info about our work in progress.

Flow (Messaging/Discussions)


This quarter (Q4: April-June 2013)
 * release Flow Portal and start online discussions
 * prepare design spec + product plan (to guide development next year)
 * start building rapid testing framework with metrics (to quickly test UI designs)
 * prepare face-to-face roundtable with key stakeholders (June?)
 * start front-end development (core messaging features)
 * start back-end infrastructure (to support large messaging database)
 * deploy first prototype (on mediawiki.org?)

Next quarter (Q1: July-September 2013)
 * First experimental release of user-to-user messaging by Sep. 2013 (meta, en-wiki)
 * Release may be limited to a small user group (e.g., opt-in, single workflow)

Following quarter (Q2: October-December 2013)
 * Full production release of user-to-user messaging by year-end (meta, en-wiki, other language?)
 * Release would available to all users (only single workflow for other language?)
 * More languages + projects soon after the initial release

Remaining quarters (Q3 and Q4: January-June 2014)
 * Visible progress for article talk + subscriptions framework on Wikipedia by June 2014
 * Precise milestones to be determined as the project develops
 * Won't have all talk-based workflows enabled by year-end

Note that the Flow team will prepare a more detailed plan for that product line in coming weeks, and the Flow milestones in our E2 planning page are still preliminary. See our project page for more information about our work in progress.

Article Feedback


This quarter (April-June 2013)
 * fix bugs + deploy final features (as needed, prioritized by urgency)
 * re-deploy opt-in version on English Wikipedia (once final bugs are fixed)
 * help projects evaluate the tool (e.g. update metrics dashboards for new tools)

Next quarter (July-September 2013)
 * prepare for wider releases on non-English Wikipedias (e.g. French and/or German Wikipedia)
 * participate in community discussions (as requested by each project)
 * discuss possible support of future deployments (with interested projects)

See our features under consideration for more information about our work in progress.