Design - MediaWiki

Statement of Purpose

Design at Wikimedia Foundation makes sharing of all human knowledge easy and joyful. For everyone.

The Foundation Product Design team's goal is to ensure that Wikimedia products and communications follow a design process centered on the user. Based on research to understand people’s needs and motivations, we explore solutions that meet those needs.

We design in the open with a transparent and participatory process. We collaborate within the Wikimedia Foundation and with the global community of contributors. We create well-designed solutions, together.

Read more about the background for this statement of purpose.

Product Design & Strategy

The product design and design strategy team has over 500 years of combined user experience design and research, engineering, information architecture, HCI, visual design, and usability experience.

Product Design

Design Strategy

Process

How to get involved and work with us

We welcome help in many ways, but we have limited time and have priorities based on the Foundation's roadmap to focus on. We want to make sure we foster an environment where community designers can contribute to the projects as well as developers.

A few ways to help out by volunteering your time:

Review, create or contribute to Phabricator design tasks with one of the following tags:
- Design – for issues or requests related to design in Wikimedia movement projects
- Design-Research – for design research requests
- Codex – Design System for Wikimedia including our default user interface library based on Vue.js (which is aimed to replace OOUI in mid-future)
- Wikimedia-Design-Style-Guide, the predecessor of Codex
- OOUI – our former default user interface library (2015-2022, still maintained and improved, but without new feature development)
- Accessibility – for all tasks that are meant to make our interface more accessible and inclusive
- MediaWiki-Interface
Learn about the Wikimedia design principles and how to give design feedback
Help with Micro Design Improvements (obsolete)

Projects

What we're working on

Many (but not all) of our cross-disciplinary product teams have a UX designer embedded into the team, where they focus on the User Experience (UX) for the team. Here's a list of the teams in which designers are currently working.

Web - The Web Team focuses on the reading experience and is currently working on the Desktop improvements project.
Growth - The Growth team focuses on features to encourage activation and retention of new editors on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
Inuka - The Inuka team focuses on aligning with the needs of audiences from historically underserved communities, and regions of recent digital growth, particularly through mobile devices.
Languages - The languages team focuses on reducing barriers to access and share knowledge. Our main focus is on content and section translation to support the translation of Wikipedia articles into more languages.
Trust and Safety - The Trust and Safety Tools team focuses on features to increase digital, and physical safety on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects.
Android - The Android team focuses on building inclusive mobile-first experiences, equitably filling knowledge gaps and increasing quality contributions to Wikipedia.
iOS - The iOS team focuses on building mobile first inclusive, consistent, and permeable features to make editing, reading, and participating on Wikipedia intuitive for iOS app users.
Campaigns - The Campaigns Team is focused on building tools to help campaign and event organizers effectively engage participants as successful editors and retain them as contributors on Wikimedia projects.
Community Tech - The Community Tech Team is focused on equity and community impact, building and improving curation and moderation tools crowdsourced from experienced users through the Community Wishlist Survey.
Abstract - The Abstract Wikipedia Team is focused on building Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia, both efforts towards a multilingual Wikipedia where more people can share more knowledge in more languages.
Design Systems - The Design Systems team focuses on creating, maintaining and improving the Wikimedia Design System that provides the building blocks for everything we do.
Structured Data - The Structured Data Across Wikimedia team is focused on structuring content on wikitext pages in a way that will be machine-recognizable and relatable, to make reading, editing, and searching easier and more accessible across projects and on the Internet.

Design resources

Our resources for majority of our work are public and in open source projects. Have a look at the Wikimedia Design Style Guide (on Github) and its Resources section.
When designing with us bear in mind our Design best practices.

All our graphics assets are licensed under open licenses (but note that many of the logos are trademarked). All our user interface development is public in open source projects.

Reach out or stay up-to-date

Archived, obsolete resources

For historical context:

Iconography (redirects to the archived WikiFont)
mediawiki.ui - User interface library (CSS class based approach, archived as superseded by OOUI)
Living style guide (archived PDF, the website [http://livingstyleguide.wmflabs.org/] is defunct)
Design Critique
Design Team Roles