Wikimedia Developer Summit/2017/Program/Wikimedia Foundation Product and Technology Q&A
In occasion of the Wikimedia Foundation Product and Technology Q&A session at the Wikimedia developer Summit 2017, a survey was created requesting questions for Wes Moran and Victoria Coleman, as well as votes to decide which questions should be asked first.
After 25 days and 1840 votes on 40 ideas, this is the result (source):
| # | Which question would you ask first to the Wikimedia Foundation Product and Technology management? | Score |
|---|---|---|
| 1 | How can we ensure timely reviews of volunteer contributions to MediaWiki code? | 80 |
| 2 | During the next year or so, what balance do you think we should strike between new projects and technical debt? | 67 |
| 3 | How can we encourage more volunteer contributions to the MediaWiki codebase? | 67 |
| 4 | What is the biggest threat to Wikimedia/MediaWiki in terms of technology? | 62 |
| 5 | For WMF dev teams, what is the right balance between pushing own work versus seeking and supporting volunteer contributors? | 61 |
| 6 | What is the priority of making MediaWiki useful for 3rd parties, relative to other WMF goals and investments? | 60 |
| 7 | How do we deal with the lack of maintainers for all Wikimedia deployed code? | 60 |
| 8 | Whose responsibility is to assure that all MediaWiki core components and the extensions deployed in Wikimedia have active maintainers? | 60 |
| 9 | In addition to Community Tech, should the other WMF Product teams prioritize their work taking into account the Community Wishlist results? | 60 |
| 10 | How important is to have a well maintained and well promoted catalog of tools, apps, gadgets, bots, templates, extensions...? | 60 |
| 11 | Do we have a plan to bring our developer documentation to the level of a top Internet website, a major free software project? | 59 |
| 12 | Are there complex problems blocking progress in your departments that can't be solved just by "throwing money" at them? | 58 |
| 13 | Will MediaWiki ever become easier to install and manage? (e.g. plugin manager à la Wordpress). How much do we care about enterprise users? | 58 |
| 14 | How can volunteers bring ideas and influence the WMF annual plans and quarterly goals? (currently when plans are published it's too late) | 58 |
| 15 | What vision do you see for MediaWiki and volunteer developers 5 years from now? | 56 |
| 16 | How can we encourage WMF management and the board to assign resources towards helping the thousands of 3rd party MediaWiki developers/users? | 56 |
| 17 | What should be the role of the Architecture Committee in WMF planning (priorities, goals, resources...) and are we there yet? | 55 |
| 18 | Is it prudent to continue to maintain a strong emphasis on new product development rather than incremental improvement to existing products? | 54 |
| 19 | Should we have a code review committee assuring best practices and responsiveness handling code contributions? | 52 |
| 20 | When are we going to work on a modern talk pages system for good? | 51 |
| 21 | Should WMF continue to invest in MediaWiki? | 50 |
| 22 | What is the role of Wikimedia APIs in "every single human being can freely share in the sum of all knowledge"? Are our plans up to the task? | 50 |
| 23 | Does it make sense to treat the MediaWiki platform as a product, with developers as the users? | 48 |
| 24 | Will you expand the Community Tech Team to address the community's unaddressed tech requests? https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/2016cws | 47 |
| 25 | Who's responsibility is it to make sure there is good documentation for the MediaWiki codebase? | 44 |
| 26 | Will the Foundation fund and commit resources to implement the decisions and priorities suggested by the sessions at this summit? | 43 |
| 27 | What role should the architecture committee play in quarterly and annual planning? | 43 |
| 28 | Should we invest in MediaWiki.org to better attract and retain new users and contributors? | 42 |
| 29 | Can we expect the WMF to propose and deploy new features and major changes in a consistent way across different teams? | 42 |
| 30 | Is this a possibility? Donations made via MediaWiki.org to fund top requests of a MediaWiki Wishlist including third party use cases. | 40 |
| 31 | Who owns the "developer audience" and the "developer experience"? | 40 |
| 32 | When possible, we use research to guide product development. But the data we need is often unavailable. Do we need more research staff? | 40 |
| 33 | Should the ArchCom be actively supervising ongoing development projects? | 38 |
| 34 | Whose responsibility is to standardize procedures for deprecating public-facing code? | 36 |
| 35 | Should we seek partnerships with machine learning organizations? | 32 |
| 36 | How important is to have a space for UX design experiments, proposals and reviews that is friendly and efficient for users and designers? | 31 |
| 37 | On what basis can individual instances of technical debt be prioritized? | 28 |
| 38 | How much money out of the 80 Mio annual budget should be spend to developers on universities worldwide via local Chapters, 5 Mio or 40 Mio? | 27 |
| 39 | Should all Foundation teams use IdeaLab to propose new ideas and push them through our planning process? | 24 |
| 40 | Should ArchCom involvement be mandatory for all engineering projects? | 24 |