Wikimedia Discovery

The Discovery department of Wikimedia Engineering is building the path of anonymous discovery to a trusted and relevant source of knowledge.

Search
The CirrusSearch extension implements searching for MediaWiki using Elasticsearch, which is the search backend used at Wikimedia.

2014-15 Q4 Goals (link):
 * Measure and improve relevance for search results we serve
 * Build concentrated team and process around search features and discovery paths

Maps
To provide better maps, OpenStreetMap/Production maps cluster is a project to make OpenStreetMap available on all Wikimedia projects, at a scale sufficient for their widespread usage.

2014-15 Q4 Goals (link):
 * Get a multi-tileserver/multi-datacenter, puppetized cluster up on labs as a prep for production deployment

Wikidata Query Service (WDQS)
Wikidata query service provides a way for tools like WikiGrok to access Wikidata data, via a SPARQL API.

2014-15 Q4 Goals (link):
 * Release Wikidata Query Service available in labs, downloadable locally, and available internally in the production cluster.

APIs
API:Search and discovery lists the search APIs available and in development.

Members

 * Wes Moran, Vice President of Search & Discovery
 * Tomasz Finc, Director of Search & Discovery Engineering
 * Dan Garry, Product Manager
 * Moiz Syed, User Experience Designer
 * Oliver Keyes, Research Analyst
 * Yuri Astrakhan, Senior Software Engineer
 * Erik Bernhardson, Software Engineer
 * James Douglas, Senior Software Engineer
 * Nik Everett, Senior Software Engineer
 * Stas Malyshev, Senior Performance Engineer
 * Max Semenik, Software Engineer
 * Kevin Smith, Agile Coach
 * David Causse, Software Engineer

Roles and responsibilities
Roles and responsibilities for team members other than developers can be found here. The short form is:


 * VP: "Strategic Vision"
 * Director: "Managing People and Coordinating w/Engineering"
 * Product Manager: "Product Vision and Story Prioritization"
 * UX Design: "UX Design and Vision, and leading UI engineers"
 * Engineering Team Lead: "Architecture and Code Quality"
 * Engineer:
 * Agile Coach: "Facilitation and Process Improvement"

We are hiring. See https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Work_with_us

Mailing list
Wikimedia-search

Twitter
https://twitter.com/WMF_Discovery

Meeting minutes

 * Weekly checkins: Discovery/Checkin meeting minutes
 * Retrospectives
 * Retrospective 2015-05-06

Meetup groups

 * San Francisco
 * Directly relevant
 * Bay Area NLP (Natural Language Processing, not Neuro-Linguistic Programming)
 * San Francisco text
 * Elasticsearch San Francisco
 * Indirectly-related (these sorts of Meetup groups attract smart/enthusiastic people who like to spend their free time learning and solving problems)
 * Silicon Valley Java user group
 * San Francisco PHP
 * Bay Area Haskell users group
 * Scala study group
 * SF JavaScript
 * Oakland advanced Scala study group

Wikimania 2015
June 15-19 in Mexico City.

http://wikimania2015.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page (Need a link here for our team-specific activities)

Smart Data Conference 2015
August 18-20 in San Jose, CA.

http://smartdata2015.dataversity.net/

Past Events

 * State of the Map US 2015
 * June 6-8 in New York.
 * An annual conference for all OpenStreetMap users. http://stateofthemap.us/
 * Yuri & Max attended
 * OpenAir 2015
 * June 4 in San Francisco.
 * https://openair2015.com/
 * "OpenAir is the premier conference that focuses on creating engineering solutions to the challenges of matching. The brightest minds in the industry will come together to tackle such issues as search and discovery, trust, internationalization, mobile, identity, and infrastructure."
 * Hackathon 2015
 * Lyon, France, May.

Deployers
Useful reference for who can deploy code. Its nice to know whom to bug if you need something: