Wikimedia Engineering/2013-14 Goals

Purpose of this document: Goals for the Wikimedia Engineering and Product Development department, fiscal year 2013-14 (July 1, 2013 - June 30, 2014). Our top priorities for the year are: This document was first drafted in June-July 2013, and is being continuously updated. With the exception of milestones called out in the Annual Plan (flagged as such below), we may flexibly and continuously change quarterly objectives in response to successes and failures, as well as new opportunities.
 * Stabilization of VisualEditor and development of experimental opt-in real-time collaboration mode;
 * Continued focus on mobile contributions, expanding beyond mobile uploads;
 * Continued focus on recruiting, activating, retaining and reactivating editors through smaller interventions;
 * Development of Flow, an alternative to talk pages and markup-based workflows.

Site Operations and Site Architecture
Team members: Interdependencies:

Wikimedia Labs
Team members: Ryan Lane, Andrew Bogott, Marc-Andre Pelletier, (secondary) Sumana Harihareswara Interdependencies:

Language Engineering
Team members: Alolita Sharma, Amir Aharoni, Niklas Laxström, Santhosh Thottingal, Runa Bhattacharjee, Kartik Mistry, Pau Giner (UX), Siebrand Mazeland (Product) Interdependencies: Mobile, Visual Editor priorities 2013-2014 Roadmap:

MediaWiki Core
Team members: Greg Grossmeier, Chad Horohoe, Brad Jorsch, Antoine Musso, Aaron Schulz, Sam Reed, Tim Starling, Chris Steipp Interdependencies:

Release and QA
MW Core team members: Greg Grossmeier, Sam Reed, Antoine Musso, Chad Horohoe

QA Team members: Chris McMahon, Željko Filipin, Rummana Yasmeen (VisualEditor), Jeff Hall (VisualEditor, tech)

Interdependencies: MediaWiki Core, Site Operations and Site Architecture, and Wikimedia Labs

Engineering Community
Team members: Sumana Harihareswara, Quim Gil, Guillaume Paumier, Andre Klapper Interdependencies: Legal & Community Advocacy, Release logistics and QA, Wikimedia Labs, Analytics

Multimedia
Team members: Fabrice Florin, Mark Holmquist, Gergő Tisza (joined October 2013), Pau Giner and a senior software engineer (projected start: January 2014).

Some of these milestones for fiscal year 2013-2014 have been updated, based on community and team discussions. The projects we are considering next are outlined in these project review slides (starting in page 52).

Interdependencies: MediaWiki Core, E2, Mobile, Design
 * Based on community feedback, we identified five main areas of activity 2013-2014: improving the viewing experience and contributions/upload pipeline in the first half of the year, then focusing on file curation, discovery and placement in articles for the second half of the year. Our overall goals for this year are to increase both the number of contributions and files used in Wikipedia articles. Read more on this multimedia planning page.

Editor Engagement - Core Features
Team members:
 * Maryana Pinchuk (PM)
 * Erik Bernhardson
 * Benny Situ
 * Matthias Mullie
 * S Page (scrummaster)
 * (open)
 * Brandon Harris (designer)
 * Vibha Bamba (designer)
 * May Galloway (designer)
 * Oliver Keyes (product analyst)
 * Nick Wilson (community liaison)

Note: Our initial annual plan commitment was: "By end of December 2013, user-to-user messaging will be fully deployed in production on one or more Wikipedia projects. This release would be available to all user groups, and deployments in additional languages and projects would follow soon after the initial release. By end of July 2014, visible progress will have been made towards Flow-enabled article talk discussions, a workflow language and feed/subscriptions framework, with precise milestones to be determined. However, we don't expect that we will have Flow on all talk-based workflows by year-end." We have revised this plan somewhat.

Interdependencies:
 * Parsoid
 * Agora

Editor Engagement - Growth Team
Team members:
 * Matt Flaschen
 * Aaron Halfaker
 * Steven Walling
 * Pau Giner (Design team member, also working on Language Engineering)
 * To be hired: two additional FrontEnd Engineers

Learn more about how we formed our 2013-14 goals, and the details for each product area.

Interdependencies: Analytics, Design, VisualEditor, Mobile Web.

Mobile
Team members:

Mobile web: Apps: Product:
 * Arthur Richards
 * Jon Robson
 * Juliusz Gonera
 * Ryan Kaldari
 * Max Semenik
 * Monte Hurd
 * Brion Vibber
 * Yuvaraj Pandian

Kenan Wang Interdependencies:

VisualEditor
Team members:
 * James Forrester (PM)
 * Trevor Parscal (Lead)
 * Roan Kattouw
 * Ed Sanders
 * Rob Moen
 * Timo Tijhof
 * Kaity Hammerstein (design)

Interdependencies: Depends on Parsoid for Wikitext <=> HTML conversion.

Parsoid
Team members:
 * Gabriel Wicke (Lead)
 * Subbu Sastry
 * C Scott Ananian
 * Arlo Breault (contractor)
 * Marc Ordinas i Llopis (contractor)

See detailed roadmap.

Interdependencies: Depends on PHP preprocessor via API. Used by the VisualEditor and (as wikitext UI for HTML content) by Flow. Stable HTML DOM API useful for anybody working with our content using standard HTML/XML tools (Kiwix, Google, mobile, search, bots,..).

Analytics
Team members:

Development Research and Data Analysis Product Interdependencies:
 * Dan Andreescu
 * Christian Aistleitner
 * Stefan Petrea
 * Dario Taraborelli
 * Erik Zachte
 * Aaron Halfaker
 * Diederik van Liere

Fundraising Engineering
Team members: Interdependencies:
 * Katie Horn (Lead)
 * Adam Wight
 * Matthew Walker
 * (open)
 * Jeff Green (Ops)
 * (Fundraising team)