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

= 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.

The below goals are a collection of proposals for the team, and are subject to change. The goals which the team ends up picking may or may not be represented in the below list. 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

Wikidata Query Service
The priority, scope, and amount of work that is done on Wikidata Query Service in Q3 is dependent on analysis of the usage of the service, and feedback provided by the users of the service, in Q2.

Maps & Geo
The priority, scope, and amount of work that is done on the Maps Tile Service in Q3 is dependent on analysis of the usage of the service, and feedback provided by the users of the service, in Q2.

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

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

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.

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

Analytics
Goal setting process owner: Nuria Ruiz, Kevin Leduc

These are still WIP, 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

Draft goals: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T118868

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

Labs team
Goal setting process owner: User:Mark Bergsma (WMF)

iOS team
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.

= 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
Goal setting process owner: Dario Taraborelli

Design Research
Goal setting process owner: Abbey Ripstra

Security
Goal setting process owner: User:CSteipp (WMF)

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