Wikimedia Product

This page reflects the work done by the Wikimedia Product group. Wikimedia Product staff employed by the Wikimedia Foundation build, improve and maintain the features of Wikimedia sites.

Annual Roadmap

 * Annual Plan for Product 2016-2017
 * 2015 Product & Technology Review

Across Product

 * Technical Collaboration Guideline
 * Development Principles
 * Design Statement of Purpose
 * Monthly CREDIT Showcase: Members of our community, Reading, Editing, Discovery and Technology teams show off new work and experiments.
 * Data and research information for products and Monthly Research Showcases.
 * Program: Community Health Initiative
 * Program: Structured Data on Commons
 * Program: New Readers ongoing research that focuses on understanding potential Wikimedia readers in countries where access to the internet is quickly growing.
 * Program: Audience Research

Product Community Interaction Events

 * 2017 Dev Summit - San Francisco, United States
 * 2017 Wikimedia Conference - Berlin, Germany
 * 2017 Hackathon - Vienna, Austria
 * 2017 Wikimania - Montréal, Canada

Product Audiences & Teams
A Product Audience is a set of features developed according to specific user flows and audiences.

Discovery Audience
We build the anonymous path of discovery to a trusted and relevant source of knowledge.
 * Discovery Page: Discovery
 * Discovery Lead: Katie Horn
 * Phabricator task boards: Search (Sprint), Interactive, Portal, WDQS, Analysis (Sprint)
 * Discovery Projects: Maps, Search, Wikidata Query Service

Recent Highlights

 * Fixed/updated where depreciated code wasn't being logged anymore for MediaWiki (technical debt)

En:Sparkline
 * Performed extensive refactoring of Special:Search code to make it significantly easier to understand and build upon. (T150217) (technical debt)

Goals
Fiscal Year 2016-2017
 * Q1: July - September 2016 (WMF Q1 Review)
 * Q2: October - December 2016
 * Q3: January - March 2017
 * Q4: April - June 2017

Editing
We build collaborative, inclusive tools for creating and editing free knowledge.
 * Editing page: Editing
 * Editing head: Trevor Parscal
 * Phabricator task boards: #Editing; #Collaboration-Team-Current, #ContentTranslation-Release8, Multimedia, #Parsoid, #VisualEditor
 * Editing teams: Collaboration, Multimedia, Languages, Parsing, VisualEditor
 * Editing code coverage: Collaboration, Languages, VisualEditor

Recent Highlights
UI Standardization team met with the rest of the designers from the WMF last week to focus on style guide work. They are working towards a singular style-guide reference.

The Analytics folks are working to consolidate our various data sources into one place. We've worked with Analytics Engineering on the historic "ee" dashboards, and have migrated the aggregate numbers to a new dashboard. Product-specific numbers will follow later. Our team members continue to spend a lot of time working to support other teams in Editing and more widely. We're currently working with various teams to help them specify good team-level metrics for their quarterly goals.

On the Collaboration team we're working on the recent changes filters beta feature, which is now available in beta labs and testwiki for early testing/QA. Since it's not at all ready yet, it cannot be enabled by regular users at this stage. We hope to make it available as a beta feature in production some time in February.

Language team is working on deploying Compact Language Links out of beta (T66793) is now restarting and we are reaching out to 3 out of the 5 remaining Wikipedia communities this week to collect feedback and plan for new deployment schedules soon after; it is done for all Wikivoyages except Russian, and all Wikibookses, Wikiversities, Wikinewses, Wikiquotes, and Wiktionaries, and for all Wikipedias except English, Swedish, German, Dutch, and French. (T136677)

Multimedia is gearing up for the work with colleagues on Structured data for Commons. More on this soon.

Parsing is working with Reading and others on support for multi-script wikis (like Chinese), initially just for reading but later for editing too. This work is now awaiting review and related additional fixes before we can declare it completed. We made a bunch of fixes to the core parser to fix some edge cases. We have also started working to finish up and provide to editors the output of the GSoC "linter" project to spot wikitext mistakes and issues for editors to fix. This should help improve the quality of the wikitext corpus and reduce errors for users. We have deployed this to the Beta cluster and expect to roll this out in production in a phased manner starting out with testwiki and smaller wikis.

Goals
Fiscal Year 2016-2017
 * Q1: July–September 2016 (WMF Q1 Review)
 * Q2: October–December 2016
 * Q3: January–March 2017
 * Q4: April–June 2017

Reading Audience
We build exceptional learning and reading experiences for the sum of all knowledge.
 * Reading Page: Reading
 * Reading Lead: Toby Negrin
 * Phabricator task board: #reading
 * Reading Projects: Community Tech, Mobile Apps, Desktop & Mobile Web, Reading Infrastructure
 * Reading code coverage

Recent Highlights
Community tech team announces the Community Health initiative with support from Craig Newmark Foundation and craigslist Charitable Fund. Grant supports development of more advanced tools for volunteers and staff to reduce harassing behavior on Wikipedia and block harassers from the site. Helping the Wikimedia volunteer community to reduce the level of harassment and disruptive behavior on our projects.

Mobile Web team deployed banding improvements on Mobile Web on notification counts and deployed Wikidata descriptions on enwiki.

Goals
Fiscal Year 2016-2017
 * Q1: July - September 2016 (WMF Q1 Review)
 * Q2: October - December 2016
 * Q3: January - March 2017
 * Q4: April - June 2017

Fundraising Tech
Technical work supporting the Wikimedia Foundation's fundraising efforts.
 * Fundraising Tech Page: Fundraising tech
 * Fundraising Tech Lead: Katie Horn
 * Phabricator task board: #wmf-fr

Recent Highlights

 * We had 2 off hours issues at the very end of the year. There was negligible impact to Advancement but the usual process wasn't followed (inside fr-tech and cross team issues). Retros are being scheduled.
 * The current sprint is mainly bugs from December and a few small requests from fr-online.
 * We will be restarting Paypal and the Central Notice Banner Sequence in the next sprint.

Goals
Fiscal Year 2016-2017
 * Q1: July - September 2016
 * Q2: October - December 2016
 * Q3: January - March 2017
 * Q4: April - June 2017

Team Practices Group
The Team Practices Group (TPG) supports the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) teams in their continual improvement.
 * Page: Team Practices Group
 * Lead: Kristen Lans
 * Phabricator task board: #Team-Practices

Recent Highlights

 * A few new mentoring/coaching engagements: Seddon (project management coaching), Erica Litrenta (CL scope and expectations), Mel K (cross-functional Phab workflows)
 * Continued prep for structured data grant retro (scheduled for 2/13)
 * COLLAB JAM presentation to budget holders

Other:
 * Ongoing embedded work with 7 Product and Technology teams

Goals
Fiscal Year 2016-2017
 * Q1: July - September 2016
 * Q2: October - December 2016
 * Q3: January - March 2017
 * Q4: April - June 2017

Wikidata
Wikidata is a free and open knowledge base that can be read and edited by both humans and machines. This project is maintained by the Software Development & Engineering department at Wikimedia Deutschland.
 * Page: Wikidata
 * Discussion List: wikidata@lists.wikimedia.org
 * Lead: Lydia Pintscher
 * Phabricator bugs & tasks board: #wikidata

Recent Highlights
WMF met with WMDE to review progress against goals as part of the partnership between the chapters and to review new roadmaps. We also discussed the chapters working together on Structured Data on Commons and Mediawiki development.

This week in the press there was a post Wikidata: the new hub for cultural heritage and the team will be present at FOSDEM, Brussels, February 4-5th. Some new highlights include coordinates on Russian Wikipedia now link to maps generated with the Kartographer extension. The map includes the location outline, if that object exists in OpenStreetMap (OSM) with a corresponding Wikidata ID (ways and relations only, not nodes). QuickStatements V2 can now run your commands in the background, no need to keep the browser tab open anymore. Example of Wikidata in the wild: List of churches generated from Wikidata on Cymraeg Wikipedia and a Wikidata Query Service highlight - Fire stations in Paris

Goals
Fiscal Year 2016 Fiscal Year 2017
 * Q1: January - March
 * Q2: April - June
 * Q3: July - September
 * Q4: October - December
 * Q1: January - March
 * Q2: April - June
 * Q3: July - September
 * Q4: October - December