Wikimedia Engineering/2015-16 Q1 Goals
Purpose of this document: Goals for the Wikimedia Engineering and Product Development department, for the first quarter of fiscal year 2015–16 (1 July 2015 – 30 September 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: 
In progress, 
To do, 
Postponed, 
Done or 
Partially done
Product[edit]
Community Tech[edit]
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Publicly document the scope, roadmap, and processes for the team on-wiki and officially announce the team to the world |
|
|
Aug 2015 | In progress
|
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.
Search[edit]
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Enhance the experience for our users that search by reducing the number of search queries that return zero results. |
|
|
Aug 2015 | Not done
|
Wikidata Query Service[edit]
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Allow users on our cluster to run arbitrary queries on the data contained in Wikidata by deploying the Wikidata Query Service. |
|
|
Aug 2015 | Done
|
Maps & Geo[edit]
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Allow users on our cluster to build features using maps by deploying a Wikimedia Maps Tile Service. |
|
|
Aug 2015 | Done
|
Analysis[edit]
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Further our understanding of whether our search is giving our users relevant results by finding, implementing and deploying a quantitative metric to measure user satisfaction with search. |
|
|
Aug 2015 | Done
|
Editing[edit]
Goal setting process owner: User:Trevor Parscal (WMF)
The Editing Department build collaborative, inclusive tools for creating and editing free knowledge. In Q1, the Department will focus on rationalizing technologies and strengthening engineering practices whilst delivering on the key user workflows for editors across the product range.
VisualEditor Team[edit]
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.
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Successfully complete deployment of VisualEditor on the English Wikipedia | VisualEditor is enabled for new accounts on the English Wikipedia |
|
EOQ | Done
|
| Secure and build upon the foundational work for comprehensive mobile support | VisualEditor on a mobile phone secures positive feedback in pre-deployment user testing | – | EOQ | In progress
|
| Improve stability and maintain or increase test coverage | Code coverage is maintained at or increased from current levels – 75% overall, 87% in dm and 66% in ce.
|
– | EOQ | Done
|
| Stretch: Hiring a mobile-expert engineer | VisualEditor team has a mobile-expert engineer join, to bring the team up to 5.0 FTE | Recruiting department | EOQ | Done
|
Collaboration Team[edit]
Increase communities’ capacity for collaboration, participation and curation across our wikis.
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Align with UI standards | Convert common UI elements in Flow to use OOjs UI | OOjs UI engineers on other teams | EOQ | In progress
|
| Remove urgent blocker to Ops | Switch Flow to work with the “External Storage” cluster’s compression needs | Operations and DBAs | Now | In progress/ Done
|
| Reduce the department’s technical debt | Convert all existing uses of LiquidThreads to Flow, where the community is willing | Community Liaisons | EOQ | In progress
|
| Reduce ongoing deployment support burden | Add support for users to be able to enable/disable Flow on their user talk page through beta features | EOQ | In progress
|
Multimedia Team[edit]
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.
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reduce performance drag of multiple technologies | UploadWizard is completely converted to OOUI with no loading of jQuery UI code, technical debt | OOUI engineers on other teams | EOQ | In progress
|
| Stretch: Uploading within VisualEditor | Users can upload files from within VisualEditor without abandoning their edit | Previous objective | EOQ | In progress
|
| Stretch: Graph integration with VisualEditor | Users can view, create and modify charts from the Graph extension inside VisualEditor | Fellow GSoC mentors in other teams | End 2015-08 | Done
|
Language Team[edit]
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.
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Move Content Translation out of beta feature for a subset of wikis. | In Wikipedia in at least one language Content Translation is enabled by default.
A conversion process from beta status to default status is defined. |
End of September | In progress
| |
| Engage with the translators to keep them translating with the help of notifications, appreciations, campaigns and article suggestions. | At least 33% of the users who published anything with CX, made at least 5 translations.
At least 20,000 articles are published using CX. |
End of September | In progress
| |
| Translation tool enhancements for better links, reference, dictionary support and provide the parallel corpora to enhance MT engines. | Parallel corpora implemented, task 95886 resolved, so that third party machine translation developers can use the output of users of Content Translation. Access to at least 3 more dictionaries implemented. | End of September | In progress
| |
| Have an initial exploration for mobile support | An initial exploration plan written and reviewed task T105191. | End of August | In progress
|
Parsing Team[edit]
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.
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Fix all blocker bugs affecting VE’s deployment to English Wikipedia. | Zero Parsoid-related VE deployment blocker bugs in Phabricator | Services, VisualEditor | EOQ | In progress
|
| Improve performance of parsing (wikitext -> HTML) | Speed up PEG tokenizer by 25% | EOQ | In progress
| |
| Reduce rendering differences between Parsoid HTML & PHP Parser HTML | At least 10% test pages render with pixel perfect accuracy.
At least 75% render with "< 1% diffs". |
EOQ | To do
|
Fundraising Tech[edit]
Goal setting process owner: User:AGomez_(WMF), User:Khorn_(WMF)
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon upgrade - task T87625 |
|
Amazon, fundraising online | EOQ | In progress
|
| PCI gap analysis and Improvements - task T77912 |
|
|
Unlikely to complete in Q1 | In progress
|
| Continue to maintain and improve fundraising infrastructure, with a special focus on critical components for the Big English fundraiser |
|
None | Ongoing in Q1 | In progress
|
Infrastructure[edit]
Analytics[edit]
Goal setting process owner: Kevin Leduc
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Complete an audit of EventLogging Data | All EL Schemas have been reviewed, documentation has been updated and data retention/purging/sanitation automated. | Reading Editing Research | Feb 2016 | In progress
|
| Deploy in production an API for Pageviews | Analytics metrics will provide data on usage of the API by the community (for example daily queries & visitors) | October | Done
| |
| Publish daily pageview counts per project in Vital Signs | https://vital-signs.wmflabs.org is live and an announcement is made on wikitech-l. | July | Done
| |
| Migrate EventLogging to use Kafka | EventLogging’s capacity increases beyond 1000 messages / second | Ops | EOQ | Done
|
Release Engineering[edit]
Goal setting process owner: Greg Grossmeier
All tracked in: #releng-201516-q1 - More details at Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/Goals/201516Q1
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| STRENGTHEN |
|
Operations / WMF Labs | EOQ | Done
|
| FOCUS
Improve deployment tooling |
|
Services / Operations |
EOQ | Partially done
|
| FOCUS |
|
(small) Operations | EOQ | Partially done
|
Services[edit]
Goal setting process owner: Gabriel Wicke
Tracked in: T102306
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Mobile app service deployment and API
Reduce app load times and duplicated development effort with an app API, providing app-specific content and metadata, backed by a service built by the app team. |
|
|
EOQ | Done
|
| Scale RESTBase, and set up cross-datacenter replication
Add the storage and throughput we'll need to store more types of content, as well as historical revisions. Establish redundancy at the DC level for site availability and disaster recovery. |
|
|
EOQ | Done
|
| Figure out a plan for change / event propagation
Changes to structured data and other events need to be propagated through storage and cache layers. Our current systems are not up to the task, which holds back development and causes bugs. We aim to make change propagation reliable, efficient, and manageable for developers. |
|
|
EOQ | Done
|
Technical Operations[edit]
Core Ops team[edit]
Goal setting process owner: User:Mark Bergsma (WMF)
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Reduce missing cluster dependencies in codfw data center |
|
|
EOQ | Done
|
| Update Wikimedia mail systems |
|
|
EOQ | Done
|
| Reduce our security attack vectors |
|
EOQ | Done
|
Labs team[edit]
Goal setting process owner: User:Mark Bergsma (WMF)
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Strengthen: Improve reliability of Wikimedia Labs |
|
EOQ | Done
| |
| Experiment: Evaluate and test a new distributed cluster environment for Tool Labs |
|
EOQ | Done
|
Reading[edit]
For full set of internal goals, see: Reading/Strategy and Roadmap
| Team | Objective | Key Result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Infrastructure |
|
Creation of a metrics dashboard to track improvements to system. | None | EOQ | Done
|
| Mobile Apps |
|
10% increase in Android app user engagement as defined:
(Full Pageviews + TextExtracts retrievals with link preview feature) >= 1.1 * (Pageviews prior to link preview) |
|
EOQ | Done
|
| Web |
|
Time to first render on mobile does not take more time than desktop (as measured by graphite), given equal network speed |
|
EOQ | Done
|
UI Standardization team[edit]
| Objective | Key Result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Establishing process of community involvement |
|
Community Liaison | EOQ | Done
|
| Simplifying interface of current in-use items and widgets |
|
Editing | EOQ | Partially done
|
| Enhance accessibility of OOjs UI library/LSG (Blueprint) |
|
None | EOQ | Partially done
|
| User Research on our users' current workflow |
|
partially Design Research | EOQ | Postponed
|
Technology[edit]
Architecture[edit]
In progress
Performance[edit]
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 Performance Team Goals.
(T102306)
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ~30% improvement in site performance in 3 months. |
|
Sept 2015 | Done
|
Research[edit]
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[edit]
Our focus in Q1 will be on scaling up and evaluating data-intensive services the team has been designing: an edit and article quality classification API and recommender systems for article creation. Time permitting, we will kick off a project to measure who adds value to Wikipedia and iterate on article creation recommendations, as stretch goals.
Goal setting process owner: Dario Taraborelli [ Wikimedia Research goals overview ]
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Productize revscoring and wiki labels |
|
|
End of Q1 | Done
|
| Run controlled tests of article translation recommendations |
|
|
End of Q1 | Done
|
| Measuring value added (stretch) |
|
none |
End of Q1 | In progress (moved to next Q)
|
| Re-train and productize article translation recommendations (stretch) |
|
|
End of Q1 | In progress (moved to next Q)
|
Design Research[edit]
Our focus in Q1 will be to coordinate and implement both evaluative and generative design research for the prioritized product track projects as well as iterating our pragmatic personas toward being fully researched Personas. Time permitting, we will mentor and collaborate with designers and prototypers toward doing usability testing for thier track teams, and we will grow our participant database.
Goal setting process owner: Abbey Ripstra [ Wikimedia Research goals overview ]
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Support prioritized user facing product projects with track teams by doing generative research (exploring and better understanding user needs, context and pain points) and evaluative research (evaluating concepts and functionality with specific users for usability and how they support needs.) |
|
|
end of Q1 | Done
| |
| Iterate the set of pragmatic personas developed in Q4 FY15 toward fully researched personas. |
|
|
end of Q1 | Partially done
|
|
| Teach and mentor more designers and protoypers to do evaluative research (usability testing) to support user friendly, intuitive product development within the track teams. (Stretch) |
|
Collaboration and willingness from designers and prototypers on track teams. | Done
| ||
| Grow our participant database. (Stretch) |
|
|
Done
|
Security[edit]
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. During Q1, the Security Team will focus on making security measurable, in addition to maintaining the safety of our sites and users. The following is a summary of the Security Team Goals.
| Objective | Key result | Dependency | ETA | Status |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Automated dynamic scanning of MediaWiki in beta |
|
|
Sept 2015 | To do
|
| Document and report initial metrics for security bug handling | Sept 2015 | To do
| ||
Support security and privacy initiatives from other teams:
|
|
Sept 2015 | In progress
|