Platform Evolution

The Platform Evolution Program is a cross-departmental program of the Wikimedia Foundation involving the Technology, Audiences, and Community Engagement departments. The program was initiated in July 2018 with the following goal:"Empower the Wikimedia Foundation to accomplish its goals of Knowledge Equity and Knowledge as a Service by evolving and investing in our technology stack to improve its flexibility, maintainability, and sustainability."The program is focusing in its first year on the following outcomes:


 * Outcome 1: Engineers have a clear understanding of our technology stack and the plan to better scale, maintain and test it
 * Outcome 2: Engineers are able to access more functionality of the stack using well encapsulated components and well defined APIs
 * Outcome 3: Engineers better understand our current architecture and coding standards and where to find them

The first activity of the Platform Evolution Program is to gather input from stakeholders of the Wikimedia technology stack (including MediaWiki and related software and content). This feedback will be synthesized and provided as guidance to the Program Committee of the Wikimedia Technical Conference 2018, which has as its goal, "making informed decisions in the evolution of our platform while building our technical community engagement and enhancing our product vision."