Wikimedia Engineering/2014-15 Goals/Q3
Strategic context for this quarter:
- We are renewing our focus on VisualEditor as a core commitment we must deliver at a high level of quality, to make it easier for anyone to edit our projects. After two quarters of foundational work, many key blockers have been addressed and we are confident that we can make a successful push toward wider usage.
- On the mobile web, we continue to focus on contributions beyond editing. While we have seen success and growth of mobile editors, we recognize that the mobile web is not simply a smaller version of the desktop, and offers new opportunities for casual participation. This quarter, we are calling out specifically the work on the mobile web, but the work in apps continues, consolidating and building on the readership focused features we launched last quarter.
- We have long committed to being a data-driven organization. In order to make data a part of every product team's day-to-day decision-making, we need to ensure that key metrics are reliably collected (instrumentation). We will demonstrate this in the context of the VisualEditor release, to improve practices across the organization in the long term.
What we are consciously not yet calling out as a top priority:
- The Wikidata Query Service. We are continuing work on this project, prototyping different technical solutions and specifically using the mobile web team's work and the existing WDQ-based tools to inform requirements. However, we recognize that we are still in the prototyping stage, and we're not yet staffed to make this a top priority for this quarter.
- SOA Auth. The priorities of the services engineering team in particular will need to be fully aligned with shipping VisualEditor and mobile features, so we are reluctant to call out any specific service that may need to be de-prioritized.
- Fundraising refactor / A/B testing. With the analytics team focused on instrumentation and fundraising-tech busy with post-fundraiser cleanup and payment processing related work, now is not the best time for a major cross-functional initiative to consolidate e.g. A/B testing functionality across teams.
- Front-end standardization / UX standardization work. This will take a backseat to VisualEditor work this quarter (many of the same individuals are involved), and deliverables will be scoped accordingly.
Objective |
Beneficiaries |
Measures of success | Project Lead | Accountable executive | Personnel and teams involved | Status |
---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
Prepare for bringing VisualEditor to all new users on wikis where it is currently opt-in | New Editor, Casual Editor |
Prioritised functional and technical objectives:
|
Trevor Parscal | Damon Sicore | Full Editing team (including Engineering, Product, QA, Community Engagement and Design members), plus Ori Livneh & Tim Starling.
Existing dependencies on the Parsoid and Services teams. Some likely minor dependencies on the Analytics and Platform teams. Front-end standards and continuous integration workstreams will be supported on a much lower basis by Bartosz and Timo respectively |
Overall: On track
|
Release and test two new reader-targeted contribution features on the mobile web: WikiGrok and Collections |
|
|
Maryana Pinchuk | Erik Moeller | The Mobile Web WikiGrok and Collections teams, including engineering, product, design/UX and support from Research and Analytics | WikiGrok: on track – first reader test live
Collections: renamed "Gather", due to launch a pilot by the end of March; scale expected to be limited to qualitative analysis initially. |
Fully instrument editing experiences across devices/platforms to support VisualEditor development |
|
Collect and continually visualize key metrics including but not limited to:
|
Dan Andreescu | Erik Moeller | Analytics Engineering and Research,
Design U/X, Ops |
Just Beginning |
Implement standardized product development methodology which includes community input across teams working on user-facing functionality |
|
|
Erik Moeller | Erik Moeller | Primarily: UX, Community Engagement, Product, Analytics | In progress |
For discussion and context see the talk page.