Language Onboarding and Development / Annual Plan 2024-25
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Language Onboarding and Development / Annual Plan Work 2024-25
Implement two recommendations, both social and technical, to support languages onboarding for new language communities and supporting new & smaller language communities with internationalization and localisation workflows and features to help them move towards their goals
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OKR High level objectives and key results
[edit]OKR work entails contributing to the Foundation's Product and Tech pillars to achieve the strategic goals for the department.
Objective; Communities are supported to effectively close knowledge gaps through tools and support systems that are easier to access, adapt, and improve, ensuring increased growth in trustworthy encyclopedic content.
Key result; By the end of Q2, implement and test two recommendations, both social and technical, to support languages onboarding for small language communities, with an evaluation to analyze community feedback.
Context on the key result.
[edit]In 2023/24, we worked on identifying 3 key recommendations for improving the social and technical infrastructure to support existing and new languages. A key deliverable was to compile a proposal on Language onboarding process recommendations. In FY 2024-25, our work is intended align with the Foundation Annual plan and the Product & Technology multigeneral pillars, objectives and Key results and hypothesis. Specifically we will be contributing to knowledge equity goal specifically on closing knowledge gaps We will support new language communities through tools and support systems that enable their participation to close knowledge gaps and facilitate the growth of trustworthy encyclopedic content. (Link to related conversations )
Idea 1: Providing Access to Modern Wiki Features Beyond Incubator
[edit]Description: Completely skip Incubator; have wikis start directly with a production wiki. This allows them access to modern wiki features. Currently, Incubator faces technical limitations and lacks many of the modern features found in other Wikipedia wikis. This deficiency leads to a poor editing experience for contributors. To run this as an experiment, a selected number of wikis (3-5) could start directly as production wikis, bypassing the Incubator entirely, and their progress can be observed over a few months to derive lessons for future planning.
| Hypothesis statement: If we create a selection criteria and collaborate with the Language Committee to identify 5 languages that will receive access to a full-fledged wiki with modern features, we will be able to co-articulate feasibility and readiness requirements for implementation and success measurement across the selected language communities
Hypothesis statement: If we provide production wiki access to 5 new languages, with or without Incubator, we will learn whether access to a full-fledged wiki with modern features such as those available on English Wikipedia (including ContentTranslation and Wikidata support, advanced editing and search results) aids in faster editing. Ultimately, this will inform us if this approach can be a viable direction for language onboarding for new or existing languages, justifying further investigation. |
Additional notes: Existing research already indicates a higher percentage of graduates for projects (e.g., Punjabi Wiktionary) that have an immediately preceding project (e.g., Punjabi Wikipedia) that has already graduated (see graph) from Incubator. This indicates how subsequent language wikis may benefit from existing knowledge, experience, and familiarity with infrastructure. By observing the progress of languages over a quarterly period of three months, we will assess if this results in increased monthly edits (currently, several language wikis receive fewer than one hundred edits monthly) and ultimately helps languages graduate faster (currently, the average duration for a language wiki to graduate from the Incubator is 4.4 years). We will carefully select new languages to be a part of this pilot, factoring in various criteria to be decided, considering community sensitivities. Each language will have the same start and end time. The test would be time-limited, and the final outcome would be identical for all languages joining the pilot for robust A/B testing.
Idea; Move AddwikiScript to Core
Description: Once a language is ready to graduate from the Incubator, the process of site creation on the backend begins. Currently this process is complex and involves a variety of systems. This includes configuring the domain, database, MediaWiki installation, initializing the new wiki’s database, Parsoid, Wikidata, etc. On comparable MediaWiki-based sites such as WBStack and Fandom, the process is automated and takes just several minutes. A small step towards testing this idea could involve fixing a minor aspect of the process (as an example fixing the currently broken AddWiki script and potentially integrating it with MediaWiki core) to assess its impact.
| Hypothesis statement; If we move addwiki.php to core and customize it to Wikimedia, we will improve code quality in our wiki creation system making it testable and robust, it will be easier for creators of new wikis, and thereby make significant steps towards simplifying wiki creation process . |
Additional notes: addWiki.php in WikimediaMaintenance often breaks because it has its own list of extension table SQL files which need to be kept up to date, duplicating the LoadExtensionSchemaUpdates hook which is used everywhere except Wikimedia production. The essential function of addWiki.php is not really specific to Wikimedia. It uses the configuration of an existing wiki as a bootstrap to create a new wiki. That's something which would be useful to non-WMF users. A common criticism of addWiki.php is that it's not testable outside of production. By making it be more generic, we can test it in typical local installs.
Timeline
[edit]July–September 2024
- Collaborate with Language committee to decide selection criteria for the pilot wikis
- Set up production wikis for selected wikis and invite them to edit.
- Monitor activity and provide onboarding support.
October–December 2024
- Analyze editing activity on pilot wikis.
- Discuss next steps for the following year with stakeholders and share the results through relevant channels.
Jan–March 2024
- Tracking metrics for the pilot wikis
- Prepare final report and plan to socialise it across different avenues.
- Brainstorm next steps
Essential High level objectives and key results
[edit]Essential work ensures things continue working, requests are handled appropriately, important bugs are fixed etc
Objective; Communities particularly new & smaller ones are supported with internationalization and localisation workflows and features to help them move towards their goals.
In nutshell, we will continue to work closely with language communities primarily smaller and newly formed wikis, where timely interventions and engagements are needed to support internationalization and localisation workflows and products to help these communities to keep them moving to achieve their goals. We will work closely with the Wikimedia communities about language- and region-specific needs within the products intended for multilingual use.
Key Result: Respond to internationalisation and localisation requests through timely interventions and engagements to support Language communities to move towards their goals.
Deliverables
- Provide support for new and existing languages on wikimedia projects through responding to language related issues
- Explore meaningful x collaboration and engagement opportunities for Wikimedia Language communities