Wikimedia Discovery/Checkin meeting minutes/2015-07-27

From mediawiki.org

Welcome[edit]

  • Welcome to Mikhail, our new Data Analyst (who loves machine learning)

Topics from last week (which might not need attention)[edit]

  • James (and Nik) last day July 24

Announcements, Information, Questions[edit]

  • Wikimania debrief
    • Great Discovery presentation. Good participation from audience. Possibly not recorded.
    • Maps is running on production. The tile service seems to be eagerly anticipated.
    • Dan met a guy in charge of the wikimedia portal, who is in the SF Bay area, so we will follow up later.
    • A lot of positive responses to our team. External visibility.
  • Dan will present a follow-up at the end of August
  • Moiz talked with analytics folks; we should look into doing “trending articles”
  • “Scalable Event System” planning has begun
    • Oliver will be there to represent Discovery, but others are welcome to participate as well
  • Franz from AltaVista (Oliver will talk about this)
    • Professor interested in doing research around our search engine. Oliver handling initial discussions, then will bring in Dan/Tomasz/Wes/whoever.
  • Wes heard from DuckDuckGo; will send a summary. They are interested in infoboxes.
  • Trey did research; found that some of our zero results are legitimate due to weird input.
  • Front end hiring: Interviewing 3 candidates this week.

Scrum of Scrums[edit]

  • Need a new volunteer (which is Stas - at least for now, we may do quarterly rotation afterwards)
  • Are we blocked?
    • No
  • Are we blocking? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/blocked-on-search/
    • Not really SoS blockers, but cross-departmental dependencies
      • Ops Q1 goal multi-datacenter (we will assist upon request)
    • Not really SoS blockers, but cases where Discovery members are needed by other projects:
      • Charts security issue (Yuri, following up on pre-reorg obligations)
      • Wikipedia zero (Yuri is still assigned there part-time)
      • Transparency report (Moiz, following up on pre-reorg obligations)
  • Anything from SoS that we should be aware of?

FYI[edit]

  • (None)