Wikimedia Engineering/2016-17 Q2 Goals

Purpose of this document: Goals for the Wikimedia Technology and Product Development department, for the second quarter of fiscal year 2016–17 (October 2016 – December 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

ETA fields may use the initialism EOQ (End of Quarter).

= Product =

Discovery
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.

Wikidata Query Service will not have any dedicated goals this quarter. The service will continue to be maintained by Stas and Guillaume, and Stas will work on user feature requests as time permits.

Wikipedia.org will not have any dedicated goals this quarter. Per Katie's email to the Discovery mailing list, Jan will continue to maintain the page by fixing critical bugs and performing regular statistics updates. No other work on the page is planned in Q2. The Services Team is planning on prototyping a version of wikipedia.org which uses service workers; this should increase the performance and decrease the data usage of the page, and allow some content on the page to be accessible offline, whilst having minimal or no impact on the user interface and experience of the portal.

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

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

Also see the more detailed version of these goals and Program 4 of the Annual Plan

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

This is still very much a draft. We plan to coordinate with Advancement on the details of high priority english campaign support. Also this is a very randomizing time for us. We plan to wait until the last week of September to form full bug lists and plans.

Also, starting in mid-October, we will begin a code freeze for all our major systems. Anything that has a chance of endangering the english campaign will wait until January. This may mean that other cross team projects or coordination will be largely on hold.

Community Tech
Goal setting process owner: Danny Horn

Team focused on meeting the needs of active Wikimedia contributors for improved, expert-focused curation and moderation tools.

Team Practices Group
Goal setting process owner: Kristen Lans

The Team Practices Group (TPG) supports the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) teams in their continual improvement.

Mission: TPG believes that healthy teams reliably deliver customer value and innovative products. Through dedicated resourcing, coaching, and workshops at the Wikimedia Foundation, we facilitate the use of practices that support team health, with a strong emphasis on creating conditions of clarity, trust, and continuous improvement.

Note: our team is piloting a prototype goals template.

= Technology =

Analytics Engineering
Goal setting process owner: Nuria Ruiz

These goals are preliminary until the end of September 2016, they are on priority order

Feedback can be sent to analytics@lists.wikimedia.org (public e-mail list)

Architecture
Goal-setting process owner:  Rob Lanphier

Performance & Availability
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.

Release Engineering
Goal setting process owner: Greg Grossmeier

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.

Security
Goal setting process owner: Darian Patrick

More details at Wikimedia Security Team/Goals 2016-2017

Services
Goal setting process owner: Gabriel Wicke