Wikimedia Engineering/2015-16 Q1 Goals

Purpose of this document: Goals for the Wikimedia Engineering and Product Development department, fiscal year 2015–16 (July 1, 2015 – June 30, 2016). The goalsetting process owner in each section is the person responsible for coordinating completion of the section, in partnership with the team and relevant stakeholders.

These goals will be iterated on a quarterly basis. Each quarter, the top priorities for the department as a whole will be elucidated and highlighted.

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

Team Foo
Goalsetting process owner: User:Bar

= Engineering =

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.

Search
Goalsetting process owner: Dan Garry

Wikidata Query Service
Goalsetting process owner: Dan Garry

Maps & Geo
The Maps & Geo team will be a new team at the Wikimedia Foundation tasked with scaling our existing mapping resources to enable the world to visualize Wikipedia all around them. They will start the year forming the team, inventorying existing work, and scale our tile services and osm db to be production ready. Next they'll work with the Mobile Web and App team to empower our users to use mapping resources.

Goalsetting process owner: Dan Garry

Editing
Goalsetting process owner: User:Trevor Parscal (WMF)

The Editing Department build collaborative, inclusive tools for creating and editing free knowledge. In Q1, the Department will focus on rationalizing technologies and strengthening engineering practices whilst delivering on the key user workflows for editors across the product range.

VisualEditor Team
Involve more people than ever before in the collaborative effort of building free knowledge through improving the usability, stability and performance of VisualEditor, integrated with the developing reading experience.

Collaboration Team
Increase the participation, mentoring and awareness of activity on the site by bringing structured conversations to both talk pages and the editing experience by improving and deploying Flow where it can help most.

Multimedia Team
Enrich the content of our projects with more use of multimedia assets, by streamlining media contribution with UploadWizard, and evolving the rich editing experience to better suggest media.

Language Team
Growing and accelerating projects with smaller content bases by providing and promoting enhanced Content Translation tools for translating content from projects with larger content bases.

Parsing Team
Increasing the integrity, accessibility and stability of content by providing Parsoid as both a bridge for editing wikitext documents, but also a rendering system for viewing and querying them.

Release Engineering
Goal setting process owner: Greg Grossmeier

Services
Goalsetting process owner: Gabriel Wicke

Core Ops team
Goalsetting process owner: User:Mark Bergsma (WMF)

Labs team
Goalsetting process owner: User:Mark Bergsma (WMF)

Reading
= Technology =

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 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.

Research & Data
Our focus in Q1 will be on scaling up and evaluating data-intensive services the team has been designing: an edit and article quality classification API and recommender systems for article creation. Time permitting, we will kick off a project to measure who adds value to Wikipedia and iterate on article creation recommendations, as stretch goals.

Goalsetting process owner: Dario Taraborelli

Design Research
Goalsetting process owner: Abbey Ripstra

Security
Goalsetting process owner: User:CSteipp (WMF)

We make life hard for the people who want to harm our sites or the people that use them. During Q1, the Security Team will focus on making security measurable, in addition to maintaining the safety of our sites and users. The following is a summary of the Security Team Goals.