Wikimedia Engineering/2015-16 Q2 Goals

Purpose of this document: Goals for the Wikimedia Product and Technology groups (collectively, Wikimedia Engineering), for the second quarter of fiscal year 2015–16 (1 October 2015 – 31 December 2015). 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

= Product =

Discovery
Goal setting process owner: Dan Garry

We build the anonymous path of discovery to a trusted and relevant source of knowledge.

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.

For the below goals, the objectives are relatively finalised, but the key results and dependencies still need further definition before the goals are locked in.

Wikidata Query Service
The Wikidata Query Service Team achieved its Q1 goal to release the Wikidata Query Service to production, with a public endpoint. In Q2, development on the project will be put on hold, user feedback about what features are missing will be collected, and usage of the service will be measured over the course of Q2; this will be used to assess whether further development will be required in Q3.

Maps & Geo
The Maps Team is currently on track with its Q1 goal to release the Maps tile service to production, with a public endpoint, in Q1. In Q2, development on the project will be put on hold, user feedback about what features are missing will be collected, and usage of the service will be measured over the course of Q2; this will be used to assess whether further development will be required in Q3.

Analysis
Notes:
 * In response to a request from the Head of Research and the Vice President of Product, the Discovery Analysis Team dedicated one of its analysts at 33% capacity to the annual fundraising campaign to aid in ensuring its success. This reduction in anticipated capacity places some of the above goals, particularly the first one, at risk.

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

The Editing Department build collaborative, inclusive tools for creating and editing free knowledge. In Q2, the Department will focus on rationalising technologies and strengthening engineering practices whilst delivering on the key user workflows for editors across the product range.

VisualEditor Team
Involve more people than ever before in the collaborative effort of building free knowledge through improving the usability, stability and performance of VisualEditor, integrated with the developing reading experience.

Collaboration Team
Increase the participation, mentoring and awareness of activity on the site by bringing structured conversations to both talk pages and the editing experience by improving and deploying Flow where it can help most.

Multimedia Team
Enrich the content of our projects with more use of multimedia assets, by streamlining media contribution with UploadWizard, and evolving the rich editing experience to better suggest media.

Language Team
Growing and accelerating projects with smaller content bases by providing and promoting enhanced Content Translation tools for translating content from projects with larger content bases.

Parsing Team
Increasing the integrity, accessibility and stability of content by providing Parsoid as both a bridge for editing wikitext documents, but also a rendering system for viewing and querying them.

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

UI Standardization team
Goal setting process owner: Volker Eckl

Community Tech
= Technology =

Analytics
Goal setting process owner: Kevin Leduc

Architecture
Goal-setting process owner:  Rob Lanphier

(previously discussed/published at WMF, but not posted here until 2015-12-11)

Performance
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 2015–16 Q2 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.

Research & Data
Goal setting process owner: Dario Taraborelli

Design Research
Goal setting process owner: Abbey Ripstra

Security
Goal setting process owner: User:CSteipp (WMF)

We make life hard for the people who want to harm our sites or the people that use them.

Services
Goal setting process owner: Gabriel Wicke

For details, see the Phabricator task.

Technical Operations
Goal setting process owner: User:Mark Bergsma (WMF)