Wikimedia Engineering/2015-16 Q1 Goals

Q4

Wikimedia Engineering Goals, FY2015-16, Q1 (July–September)

Q2

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, N Postponed,  Done or Partially done

Product

Community Tech

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	Documentation is publicly posted Community is aware of the team and its processes	Reach consensus on processes	Aug 2015	In progress

Discovery

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

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.	Zero results rate cut in half, from approximately 25% to approximately 12.5%. No decrease in user clickthrough rate from search results.	Discovery Analysis Team Operations: Wikimedia Labs (maintaining Labs)	Aug 2015	N Not done

Wikidata Query Service

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.	Wikidata Query Service is deployed and usable from within our cluster. Wikidata Query Service keeps with Wikidata update stream. Define metrics and KPIs for the service. Display metrics and KPIs on the Discovery Department dashboards.	Discovery Analysis Team Security (security review of service before deployment) Operations (supporting test deployment on production hardware) Operations: Wikimedia Labs (maintaining Labs)	Aug 2015	Done

Maps & Geo

Objective	Key result	Dependency	ETA	Status
Allow users on our cluster to build features using maps by deploying a Wikimedia Maps Tile Service.	Wikimedia Maps Tile Service is deployed and usable from within our cluster. Define metrics and KPIs for the service. Display metrics and KPIs on the Discovery Department dashboards.	Discovery Analysis Team Security (security review of service before deployment) Operations (supporting test deployment on production hardware) Operations: Wikimedia Labs (maintaining Labs)	Aug 2015	Done

Analysis

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.	Define and communicate search satisfaction metric. Implement data collection to measure metric in production. Visualise metric on Discovery Department dashboards. Iterate until metric can be used as KPI for Discovery Department in Q2 2015-16.	Operations: Wikimedia Labs (maintaining Labs)	Aug 2015	Done

Editing

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

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	Parsing team Community department Research department Communications department	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

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

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

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

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

Goal setting process owner: User:AGomez_(WMF), User:Khorn_(WMF)

Objective	Key result	Dependency	ETA	Status
Amazon upgrade - task T87625	Can process payments Payments appear in CiviCRM Can run a banner test	Amazon, fundraising online	EOQ	In progress
PCI gap analysis and Improvements - task T77912	3rd party scans are scheduled All policy docs except device hardening are completed Orphan slayer is moved	Security Team Operations Team	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	List of components identified as critical for Big EN and documented Soft code freeze on those critical components at EOQ	None	Ongoing in Q1	In progress

Infrastructure

Analytics

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

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 Isolate our Continuous Integration instances	boot instances from OpenStack API - task T109913 -  Done subset of jobs run in disposable instances - task T109914 -  Done	Operations / WMF Labs	EOQ	Done
FOCUS Improve deployment tooling	Implement the needed features in scap for RESTBase deploys - task T113119 -  Done	Services / Operations	EOQ	Partially done
FOCUS Migrate Gerrit to Differential	Allow repository cloning from Phabricator - task T128 - Partially done Prototype integration with our Continuous Integration infrastructure - task T103127 - Partially done	(small) Operations	EOQ	Partially done

Services

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.	Mobile app service deployed in production Public API end points & documentation	Reading 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.	Expand the existing cluster with new nodes. Set up a second RESTBase cluster in the Dallas datacenter. Establish asynchronous replication between the clusters.	Procurement Operations	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.	Document requirements Research solutions (both existing and possible development) Develop a clear plan of action	Most teams during requirement collection Analytics and ops expertise (Kafka)	EOQ	Done

Technical Operations

Core Ops team

Goal setting process owner: User:Mark Bergsma (WMF)

Objective	Key result	Dependency	ETA	Status
Reduce missing cluster dependencies in codfw data center	Deploy HTTPS caches in codfw, complete successful failover of eqiad caching traffic Deploy ElasticSearch cluster with replicated search indexes Deploy RESTbase with Cassandra replication	Discovery team (for ElasticSearch) Services team (for RESTbase/Cassandra) Procurement of network services	EOQ	Done
Update Wikimedia mail systems	Upgrade Mailman version to a new version (2.1.18) on a supported distribution and new hardware Investigate OTRS upgrade (from 3.2.14 to 4.0.9) and provide trial system for OTRS users Enable TLS encryption for inbound and outbound e-mail	fr-tech team (OTRS involvement)	EOQ	Done
Reduce our security attack vectors	Implement organized package upgrades (debdeploy) >80% of hosts protected by firewalls, or explicitly assessed as unwanted and not needed		EOQ	Done

Labs team

Goal setting process owner: User:Mark Bergsma (WMF)

Objective	Key result	Dependency	ETA	Status
Strengthen: Improve reliability of Wikimedia Labs	Meet or exceed 99.5% uptime for each Labs infrastructure service Remove all Labs support host SPOFs, using redundancy or hot spares Finish NFS migration to RAID10 storage, and implement NFS sharding Audit Labs projects on NFS dependencies and support migration to alternatives where appropriate		EOQ	Done
Experiment: Evaluate and test a new  distributed cluster environment for Tool Labs	Establish evaluation criteria for cluster solutions Evaluate cluster solutions Set up a cluster solution inside the Tool Labs project Allow Tool Labs users to experiment with their web services on the new cluster environment		EOQ	Done

Reading

For full set of internal goals, see: Reading/Strategy and Roadmap

Team	Objective	Key Result	Dependency	ETA	Status
Infrastructure	Improve MediaWiki security and extensibility by updating authentication framework	Creation of a metrics dashboard to track improvements to system.	None	EOQ	Done
Mobile Apps	Increase engagement via improved link preview (Android)	10% increase in Android app user engagement as defined: (Full Pageviews + TextExtracts retrievals with link preview feature) >= 1.1 * (Pageviews prior to link preview)	Executive Management	EOQ	Done
Web	Improve engagement via page load time decrease (mobile)	Time to first render on mobile does not take more time than desktop (as measured by graphite), given equal network speed	Release Engineering Performance Community Engagement	EOQ	Done

UI Standardization team

Objective	Key Result	Dependency	ETA	Status
Establishing process of community involvement	Evaluating ideas and setting up testing framework for UI beyond User Research team Record testing results on MediaWiki Involving community members by making our work more visible through Phabricator umbrella tasks, finding and establishing relationship to tasks-interested community members on IRC and creating MediaWiki pages with plans. clarifying our workflow where they can be collaborate	Community Liaison	EOQ	Done
Simplifying interface of current in-use items and widgets	Iterating on interface and having more consistency not only on mockup, but also on implementation	Editing	EOQ	Partially done
Enhance accessibility of OOjs UI library/LSG (Blueprint)	Change current colors to usefully meet content accessible guidelines (WCAG 2.0), at minimum level AA, but preferably AAA, alongside early process involvement of community. Implement WAI-ARIA best practices on design & code, starting with roles.	None	EOQ	Partially done
User Research on our users' current workflow	Clarification on our users' current workflow and how we can improve our work to fit into their workflow	partially Design Research	EOQ	N Postponed

Technology

Architecture

In progress

Performance

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.	Sub-second median page save time. Sub-900ms first paint time. T105391		Sept 2015	Done

Research

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

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	The stable version of production-ready ORES service up and running on Labs	Labs	End of Q1	Done
Run controlled tests of article translation recommendations	Run a pilot with WMF staff Run and analyze the results of live tests in Spanish, French and Polish Wikipedia	Community Liaison Language Engineering	End of Q1	Done
Measuring value added (stretch)	Perform historical analysis on who adds value to Wikipedia	none	End of Q1	In progress (moved to next Q)
Re-train and productize article translation recommendations (stretch)	Improving the algorithm based on user feedback Integrate the algorithm in Content Translation	Community Liaison Language Engineering	End of Q1	In progress (moved to next Q)

Design Research

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.)	Research reports with recommendations and information useful for concept development and product iteration considering specific users.	Collaboration on timing, expectations, priorities and the research with product track teams.	end of Q1	Done
Iterate the set of pragmatic personas developed in Q4 FY15 toward fully researched personas.	12 persona interviews moving our pragmatic personas to more closely reflect the humans we are building for.	Community liaisons and others to connect us with the right people to interview Participants being able to get on technology so we can interview them, as there is no budget to travel and meet them.	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)	Two designers or prototypers having done 2 or more usability tests for their teams with support from the design research team.	Collaboration and willingness from designers and prototypers on track teams.		Done
Grow our participant database. (Stretch)	Gain 1000 more volunteer participants (in our participant "database") to collaborate with in design research projects.	Fundraising and other teams to coordinate banners, and other outreach efforts (mass message, etc) with.		Done

Security

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	Tool choice documented Weekly automated scanning of beta Baseline scan results for core and one extension	RelEng - Make security testing instance perminant	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: Legal (Email encryption) Analytics (Uniques/DNT) Reader Infrastructure (AuthManager) Fundraising Tech (PCI)	Learnings documented		Sept 2015	In progress