Wikimedia Engineering/Maps & Geo Team

= Proposal =

Throughout the last number of years the question of Maps and Wikimedia has come up multiple times but has gotten little traction due to lack of staff resourcing. This proposal focuses on building and staffing a team of engineers and operations staff members to support a product pipeline of map and geospatial features.

= Products =

Each year the foundation has stressed that there are a number of map-related projects that it could work on including but not limited to


 * Supporting the OpenStreetMap community
 * Supporting an OSM Database for developers
 * Production tileset service
 * Supporting existing Geo tools
 * Increasing the amount of maps use and creation on Wikipedia
 * Increasing the amount of GEO-tagged coordinates in the Global South
 * Increasing the amount of Wikidata contributions
 * Surfacing articles near users
 * Visual navigation of the encyclopedia through points of interest
 * Increased relevance of Wikipedia in the physical world
 * Lighting up the World with content

= Background = While the foundation has made small strides in learning more about maps through initiatives like the Wiki Loves Monuments App and Special:Nearby the velocity of progress has always been limited by a lack of operations and engineering support to provide a strong and supported maps foundation. For instance, the build out of infrastructure support for OpenStreetMap has been slow and haphazard not simply due to the complexity but mostly due to priorities shifting within various teams and no one having enough time to focus on maps.

= Team = To remedy this I propose building a Maps and Geo team incubated within the Mobile Department that would have 4x engineers, 1x operations staff member, 1x community liaison, and 1x product manager. These roles may live within mobile or be matrixed into mobile if they are 100% dedicated to Maps and Geo work. This engineering team would live within Mobile as they would work very closely with the Mobile Web & App teams at first in order support their initial product work but would serve as an infrastructure team that would eventually build maps and geo functional for the organization at large across handset, tablet, and desktop. The mobile team has expressed the most amount of interest and drive for this work and the department is in a good place to absorb additional growth due to its Agile practices. = Outcome = As our mobile page-views continue to climb Wikipedia will be more and more present within the physical world. Not having maps will create an inferior product that doesn’t deliver the rich educational experience that we need to be showing. Instead we should focus our efforts at staffing this initiative and pairing it across Mobile, Multimedia, and others in order to capture the wealth of contributions and use that this will have.