Wikimedia Discovery

The Discovery department of Wikimedia Engineering is building the anonymous path of discovery to a trusted and relevant source of knowledge. We have a number of projects detailed below that focus us on creating and supporting new forms of discovery for the users of the Wikimedia wikis. For any questions about the term "Knowledge Engine" please refer to our FAQ.

You can find all of our data and key performance indicators on our data portal.

Come help us decide what we work on in the future with our request for comments.

Search
Discovery is responsible for maintaining and enhancing the various Search features and APIs for MediaWiki. This includes the CirrusSearch extension which relies on Elasticsearch the search backend used at the Wikimedia Foundation to support Wikimedia projects.

Learn more about

Current work by this team is tracked on this Phabricator workboard.

Current Goals (FY 2015-16 Q3)

 * Improve relevance of intra-wiki search results (see a small demo comparing the new suggester to the current)
 * Generate a model for user satisfaction with search results based on qualitatively-validated quantitative data.

Wikipedia.org portal
Many people discover Wikipedia via https://www.wikipedia.org/ (roughly 1.5-2% of our total page views). The Discovery team is looking at how to improve the user experience for these visitors. Here is an from the Discovery team.

Learn more about the Wikipedia.org Portal Improvements project.

Current work by this team is tracked on this Phabricator workboard.

Current Goals (FY 2015-16 Q3)

 * Make www.wikipedia.org a portal for exploring open content on Wikimedia sites.

Maps
Discovery is about finding and navigating to content, and one way for users to do that is via maps. To provide better maps the team is working to make OpenStreetMap tiles available on all Wikimedia projects. The technical challenge is doing so at a scale sufficient for their widespread usage.

Learn more about the Maps project.

Work by this team is tracked on this Phabricator workboard

Current Goals (FY 2015-16 Q3)

 * Improve the content discovery experience on Wikivoyage by rolling out maps to all Wikivoyages.

Wikidata Query Service (WDQS)
Searching structured data on Wikidata is also part of Discovery, so we are building the Wikidata query service. It provides a SPARQL API through which tools can access Wikidata.

Learn more about the Wikidata query service.

Current work by this team is tracked on this Phabricator workboard

Current Goals (FY 2015-16 Q3)

 * Support ongoing stability and add ability to support geoocordinate functionality by upgrading Wikidata Query Service to Blazegraph 2.0.

Analysis
The analysis group within Discovery manages the Discovery Dashboard, as well as analyzing A/B tests and other data.

Current work by the analysis team is tracked on this Phabricator workboard

Current Goals (FY 2015-16 Q3)

 * This quarter, instead of having team-specific goals, the analysis team will be supporting the other team's goals this quarter.

APIs
Application Programming Interfaces (APIs) provide developers ways to interact with the MediaWiki software.

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

Members

 * Tomasz Finc, Director, Head of Discovery
 * Dan Garry, Lead Product Manager
 * Moiz Syed, Design Manager
 * Oliver Keyes, Data Analyst
 * Yuri Astrakhan, Senior Software Engineer
 * Erik Bernhardson, Software Engineer
 * Stas Malyshev, Senior Performance Engineer
 * Max Semenik, Software Engineer
 * Kevin Smith, Agile Coach
 * David Causse, Software Engineer
 * Trey Jones, Software Engineer
 * Mikhail Popov, Data Analyst
 * Julien Girault, User Experience Engineer
 * Jan Drewniak, User Experience Engineer
 * Deb Tankersley, Product Manager
 * Chris Koerner, Community Liaison
 * Guillaume Lederrey, Operations Engineer

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


 * 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
Discovery -A public mailing list about Wikimedia Search and Discovery projects.

Maps - Discussion and development coordinating the integration of OpenStreetMap and other free map sources into Wikimedia projects.

Twitter
https://twitter.com/WMF_Discovery

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

Upcoming events

 * Elastic{ON} 2016
 * San Francisco February 17-19, 2016
 * "the largest gathering of Elasticsearch, Logstash, and Kibana expertise anywhere in the world."
 * https://www.elastic.co/elasticon
 * Wikimedia Hackathon 2016
 * Jerusalem, March 31 to April 3

Past events

 * Discovery Days (team gathering)
 * San Francisco January 11-12, 2016


 * Wikimedia Developer Summit 2016
 * San Francisco January 4-6, 2016
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Developer_Summit_2016
 * WMF All Hands 2016
 * San Francisco January 7-8, 2016
 * https://office.wikimedia.org/wiki/All_hands/2016
 * Hackathon 2015
 * Lyon, France, May.
 * 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."
 * 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
 * Wikimania 2015 (July 15-19 in Mexico City)
 * Presentation (video) "Are we failing our users when they search Wikipedia?" by Dan and Moiz
 * http://wikimania2015.wikimedia.org/wiki/Main_Page
 * Smart Data Conference 2015 (August 18-20 in San Jose, CA)
 * http://smartdata2015.dataversity.net/
 * Presentation (hosted at blazegraph.com): "The Wikidata Query Service - A Knowledge Graph Application Powered by Blazegraph"
 * Gerrit Cleanup Day
 * Wednesday 2015-09-23
 * Plans here: Discovery plans for gerrit cleanup day 2015
 * WikiConference USA
 * Washington DC, October 9-11, 2015
 * http://wikiconferenceusa.org/wiki/2015/Main_Page
 * At least one team member will attend. No presentations planned.
 * Discovery offsite 2015
 * Sept 30-Oct 2, Cocoa Beach FL USA
 * 5th DBpedia Community in California 2015
 * Palo Alto November 5th
 * "DBpedia is a crowd-sourced community effort to extract structured information from Wikipedia and make this information available on the Web."
 * http://wiki.dbpedia.org/meetings/California2015

Elasticsearch cluster

 * How Elasticsearch breaks Part 1 Part 2
 * Notes on unbreaking and optimizing elasticsearch

Meeting minutes

 * Weekly checkins:
 * Discovery/Checkin meeting minutes
 * Retrospectives
 * Team retrospective 2015-05-06
 * Lyon Hackathon
 * Team retrospective 2015-06-16
 * Team retrospective 2015-07-13
 * Team retrospective 2015-08-10
 * Team retrospective 2015-09-14
 * Team retrospective 2015-10-14
 * Team retrospective 2015-11-02
 * Team retrospective 2015-11-30
 * Team retrospective 2016-01-25
 * Quarterly reviews
 * Q4 2014-15 (2015-07-07)
 * Q1 2015-16 (2015-10-05)
 * Other
 * Maps and KPIs 2015-09-14
 * Quick Surveys 2016-01-26
 * Rethinking portal planning 2016-02-03

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