Wikimedia Engineering/2016-17 Q2 Goals

Q1

Wikimedia Engineering Goals, FY2016-17, Q2 (October - December)

Q3

Purpose of this document: Goals for the Wikimedia Technology and Product Development department, for the second quarter of fiscal year 2016–17 (October 2016 – December 2016). 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

ETA fields may use the initialism EOQ (End of Quarter).

Product

The Product department, alongside the community, builds, improves and maintains the user facing features on all the Wikimedia projects. The software, interfaces, apps, and other systems and applications the team supports are essential means by which contributors and readers connect with our sites. The work of the team’s three “audience” groupings – Discovery, Editing, and Reading – is interrelated and enables a channel for progressive engagement with the users of the Wikimedia projects.

• Annual Plan for Product 2016-2017

Discovery

Our mission is to make the wealth of knowledge and content in the Wikimedia projects easily discoverable.

Team	Objective	Key result	Dependency	ETA	Status
Search Goal setting process owner: Dan Garry	Enable the backend for cross-project searching from Wikipedias to their sister projects	Improve backend performance to allow cross-project searching Generate and agree upon rollout plan for enabling the cross-project search feature	Community Liaison Plan for migration path that is decided upon in Q1	EOQ	Done
	Enrich the data stored in ElasticSearch to allow targeted improvements to result relevance	Migrate away from "all" field in Elasticsearch	—	EOQ	Done (except for all spaceless languages, e.g. zh)
Interactive team Goal setting process owner: Yuri Astrakhan	Increase maps and graphs usage on Wikipedia	The <maplink> and <graph> usage graphs show an upward trend	Reading & editing team buy-in Outreach from Community liaisons	EOQ	In progress
	Enable shareable Geoshapes and Tabular data storage on Commons	Commons is able to store new formats for tabular and geographic data	Reading & editing team buy-in Legal's OK Last round of the technical review	EOQ	In progress

Wikidata Query Service will not have any dedicated goals this quarter. The service will continue to be maintained by Stas and Guillaume, and Stas will work on user feature requests as time permits. Additionally, the dedicated hardware for the service will be upgraded to support the continued growth and use of the service.

Wikipedia.org will not have any dedicated goals this quarter. Per Katie's email to the Discovery mailing list, Jan will continue to maintain the page by fixing critical bugs and performing regular statistics updates. No other work on the page is planned in Q2. The Services Team is planning on prototyping a version of wikipedia.org which uses service workers; this should increase the performance and decrease the data usage of the page, and allow some content on the page to be accessible offline, whilst having minimal or no impact on the user interface and experience of the portal.

Editing

Goal setting process owner: User:Trevor Parscal (WMF)

The Editing Department build collaborative, inclusive tools for creating and editing free knowledge.

Also see the more detailed version of these goals and Program 4 of the Annual Plan

Annual Goal	Team	Objective	Output (deliverable)	Outcome	Dependencies	ETA	Status
1: Maintain and incrementally improve current content creation and curation interfaces	VisualEditor	Iterate on the New Wikitext Editor Beta Feature	Add features to the new wikitext editor, such as auto-saved drafts, and prepare for rollout to wikis on desktop and mobile.	Editors have a unified, consistent editing interface between mobile and desktop Web, and between visual and wikitext editors.	Editing Design Community Liaisons Parsing	EOQ	Done (more coming)
2: Improve editing experience by reducing technical and product debt	Parsing	Remove Tidy dependency from MediaWiki output	Deploy (disabled by default) Tidy replacement service and deploy ParserMigration extension in production.	Editors can compare output of a page with Tidy and with its replacement service.	Operations Security Community Liaisons	EOQ	N Not done (delayed)
	Multimedia	Improve architecture of rich media file annotations	Integrate multi-content revision system to allow annotations to be used outside the file page.	Users are supplied with relevant data, tags and other information as they see media files.	WMDE Operations (DBA)	EOQ	N Not done (delayed)
	UI Standardization	Apply and refine the style guide	Apply and refine the overhauled style guidelines in current Editing products and in parts of MediaWiki core.	Users have a unified, easier-to-use interface and time-saving front-end implementation.	Design Research Editing Design Editing Front-end engineers TPG	EOQ	Done (more coming)
3: Invest in new types of content creation, and new forms of curation and collaboration tools	Collaboration	Provide an edit-review process suited to the needs of new contributors	Add ORES good-faith and damaging tests, optimized ORES data display, new filtering UI and a new user filter to the recent changes page.	Reviewers will gain insight into contributors’ intentions and be able to identify damaging but good-faith edits by new users. Also, a Beta release will yield user response information.	Analytics Research & Data Editing Design team Community Liaisons	EOQ	N Not done (delayed)
	Language	Stabilize Content Translation for going out of beta	Support for block and inline templates Users are shown an indication when templates cannot be adapted. Editing mode for block level templates	Content Translation is more stable in terms of publishing articles with templates, requiring less maintenance work from patrollers.	—	EOQ	Done (more coming)

Fundraising Tech

Goal setting process owner: User:Khorn_(WMF)

Objective	Key result	Dependencies	ETA	Status
Fix bugs and prep for Big English	Ingenico top bugs Central Notice bugs Civi CRM bugs and de-dupe fixes Stabilize, stop getting regular failmails.	Partner with Advancement to create list of key fixes	Mid November	Done
Cross Training with Operations (Jeff Green)	Increase emergency preparedness Increase bus factor Increased ability to test changes Increased availability of sensitive resources for fire fighting and debugging	only internal Fundraising Tech staff	EOQ	Partially done. Kicked off new hire.
Support Big English	Fundraising creative reaches their donation goals in December Do whatever it takes to keep the pipeline healthy for the first week of December.	Fundraising (creative) team	EOQ	Done

This is still very much a draft. We plan to coordinate with Advancement on the details of high priority english campaign support. Also this is a very randomizing time for us. We plan to wait until the last week of September to form full bug lists and plans.

Also, starting in mid-October, we will begin a code freeze for all our major systems. Anything that has a chance of endangering the english campaign will wait until January. This may mean that other cross team projects or coordination will be largely on hold.

Reading

Team	Objective	Key result	Dependency	ETA	Status
Web	Increase learning by lowering cost of exploration	Refine hovercards feature and remove all known blockers for moving from beta to stable	Results of a/b test in Hungary, Russia, Italy Community Liaisons	EOQ	In progress
iOS	Enable location based exploration and search.	Add a Nearby tab (similar to Android) with map based search and browsing functionality.	Design Research	Update: Q3	In progress
Android	Open up a new and simple way for readers to start contributing, and reinforce the idea that Wikipedia articles are editable by anyone.	Enable editing of Wikidata descriptions from the app.	Wikidata Consultation Design research Community Liaisons	EOQ	In progress
New Readers	Collect feedback on direction and implementation of proposed user-facing software changes from both potential end-users and community members.	Deliver a wrap up report of the feedback that was received and the changes that were made as a result.	Design Research Community Engagement Communications Partnerships	EOQ	In progress
Reading Infrastructure	Bolster MediaWiki API consumer (apps, bots, mashups, etc.) ability to obtain key revision quality and pageview stats	MediaWiki API endpoints are available and operate at scale for: Revision quality (T143895) Pageviews and velocity (T144865)	Research (ORES), Analytics	EOQ	To do
Mobile content service	Notify users that Wikipedia has the background info on the latest current events	Deploy real time Trending Page API based on the number of edits performed by users	Services	EOQ	In progress

Community Tech

Goal setting process owner: Danny Horn

Team focused on meeting the needs of active Wikimedia contributors for improved, expert-focused curation and moderation tools.

Objective	Key result	Dependency	ETA	Status
Increase core contributors' productivity	Build a proof-of-concept version of Cross-wiki watchlist (#4 on wishlist), to determine the hardware requirements for the finished tool	Performance Operations	EOQ	To do
Help program leaders to organize and manage their programs	Make UI improvements to WMF's Programs & Events Dashboard	Learning and Evaluation WikiEd Foundation	EOQ	Done
Improve the contribution workflow for an underserved Wikimedia project/language	Deploy a tool to use Google OCR service for Indic language Wikisources		EOQ	Done
Include Wikimedia communities in goal development and prioritization	Conduct 2016 Community Wishlist Survey, in collaboration with contributors from all Wikimedia projects		EOQ	Done
Reduce barriers for new volunteer developers	Extend Striker to help new developers create an LDAP account and manage their SSH keys, removing barriers in the new account creation process	Security	EOQ	In progress
Improve workflows for Tool Labs developers	Define evaluation criteria for evaluating Platform as a Service (PaaS) solutions	Tool Labs Community	EOQ	In progress
Encourage community maintenance of important tools	Develop a takeover policy for abandoned tools, in collaboration with the Tool Labs community	Tool Labs Community	EOQ	Done
Measure success of Tool Labs changes over the last 12 months	Run a second annual Tool Labs user survey and analyze the results	Tool Labs Community	EOQ	Done

Team Practices Group

Goal setting process owner: Kristen Lans

The Team Practices Group (TPG) supports the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) teams in their continual improvement.

Mission: TPG believes that healthy teams reliably deliver customer value and innovative products. Through dedicated resourcing, coaching, and workshops at the Wikimedia Foundation, we facilitate the use of practices that support team health, with a strong emphasis on creating conditions of clarity, trust, and continuous improvement.

Note: our team is piloting a prototype goals template.

Goal 1: Maintain the quality of our services across embedded teams that we support
What is your objective / workflow?	Who are you working with?	What impact / deliverables are you expecting?	Status
Work with teams requesting embedded TPG support	Design Research (collaborating on survey) Q2 Embedded teams	Maintain average net promoter score of 40 or greater across embedded teams. We also aim to learn from open-ended feedback from customers.	Done
Goal 2: Ensure high-quality of service to Light Engagement customers
Work with teams requesting lightweight coaching or workshops	Design Research Light Engagements TBD	Establish baseline metrics for Light Engagements: Determine what questions are giving us the most meaningful information Could be: net promoter score, ratings of "outcome being better with TPG's involvement", or something around open-ended feedback Use that feedback and associated metrics to drive our own learning and improvements	Done
Goal 3: Work with Design-related roles and stakeholders to improve collaboration
Iterative and incremental cross-team and organizational collaboration improvements	Community Liaisons Design  (ux engineers, ux designers, design researchers, communications) External design stakeholders (broader WMF Staff, Community members)	Design Statement of Purpose Phase 2: Integrate feedback from WMF and community into finalized design statement of purpose Define general action plan and one experiment to run to get from current state to ideal state (represented in SOP) See https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Team_Practices_Group/Design_engagement/Post-interview_roadmap	Partially done

Wikidata

Goal Setting and process owner is Lydia Pintscher.

Wikidata is Wikimedia's structured data project and knowledge base. Our goal is to support all the other Wikimedia projects with structured data and provide a top-notch knowledge base to everyone who needs structured data about the world.

Objective	Key result	Dependency	ETA	Status
UI Improvements We will continue to evolve the user interface based on results of usability testing, user feedback and trends in our larger ecosystem.	Established UX Design and UX Research process to incorporate user feedback and iterate the user interface with the community.		EOQ	In progress
Wikimedia Commons build out In 2015 the Wikidata development team and the WMF Multimedia team have started working on improving Wikimedia Commons infrastructure by providing it with structured data support. This work will continue in 2016 / 2017. The end result will be a good technical foundation to store metadata related to multimedia files in a structured and machine-readable way. This will allow many future innovations like multilingual search and display of file information, easier license compliant re-use of our content and a richer multimedia experience on Wikipedia. We're making progress towards that goal.	Testsystem running Integrate community feedback for further development	Editing (Multi Media) Team / activities Ops Team (Deployment) & Discovery team (for Search) Commons community	Q4	In progress
ArticlePlaceholder Some of our small projects struggle to provide their readers with the information they are searching for because they lack manpower. The ArticlePlaceholder can help those projects. When searching for a concept that is not covered by an article on the project the reader will be shown a quick overview of the information available on Wikidata about this concept. The reader will also be invited to start writing an article.	Refinement and further roll-out of the ArticlePlaceholder extension At least five Wikimedia projects actively use ArticlePlaceholder extension	Wikipedia Communities (small WP)	EOQ	Done
Automated list generation Wikipedias have a lot of list articles like the list of space missions. They are currently maintained and updated by hand. With Wikidata we can provide the means to automatically generate them based on data in Wikidata while still giving the editors full control. This activity depends on the Wikidata Query Service currently in development together with WMF.	Provision of an automated list generation feature Automated list generation feature is used in at least five Wikimedia project's	Input from Discovery team	Q4	In progress
Unit conversion & new data types The height a mountain and other measurements can be entered in Wikidata. The editor can specify it using the unit given in the original source of the data point. However, to be able to meaningfully query all this data and for example get a list of the ten highest mountains, these data points need to be converted to a base unit. We will make this possible and provide converted data to the Wikidata Query Service.	New datatypes: Implement new data types/Improve existing ones. More and better ways to input data leading to more and better quality data. Unit conversion possible to query for data in standard units	Input & Implementation supported by Discovery team	Q4	New Datatypes: Done Unit conversion: In progress
Extend and Implement data partnership process with community Data from external sources becomes increasingly important as Wikidata grows. Data donations enrich not just Wikidata, but are then also availible to generate more content in Wikimedia sister projects. From the external perspective, WMDE has the opportunity to grow Wikidata’s reach, relevance and usability for partners and institutions beyond the Wikimedia projects.	Process and key contacts for data partnerships published. Published two success stories about successful data partnerships	Wikidata community	EOQ	In progress

Technology

Analytics Engineering

Goal setting process owner: Nuria Ruiz

These goals are preliminary until the end of September 2016, they are on priority order

Feedback can be sent to analytics@lists.wikimedia.org (public e-mail list)

Objective	Key result	Dependency	Outcome/Rationale/Value Proposition	Status
Productionize Druid Pageview Pipeline and UI (pivot) on Druid task T138261	Easy access for WMF-internal users to Druid query UI. Users can get to pageview data without having to write SQL	Security, Operations	Carry on from LAST quarter	Done
Operational Excellence	“Eventlogging resiliency” (events are dropped when zookeeper and kafka restarts): task T142430  Done Varnishkafka integration testing task T147432  Done Organize http://datasets.wikimedia.org task T125854 N Not done Support Varnishkafka migration of text/upload as Operations team needs it  Done Cassandra work: Add more capacity task T144833 N Not done limn1 instance on labs should die: task T146308  Done	Operations	Set of tasks needed to keep lights up and update/upgrade existing systems to maintain and improve current level of service
Count Pageviews for all wikis. task T130249	Outreach wiki and others will be able to easily retrieve pageviews from pageview API			Done
Wikistats 2.0 (ongoing goal). ticket task T130256.	* Replacing edit metrics in dashiki with data from new edit data depot task T143924		Enables Easy consumption of edit data. At this time consuming edit data from database or dumps is cumbersome	Done
Public Event Stream (ongoing goal). Details: here task T130651	Productionization of POC that happen last quarter task T143925			N Not done
A/B testing framework design doc. task T135762		Contingent on traffic's team avaialability		N Not done

Architecture

Goal-setting process owner:  Rob Lanphier

Objective	Key result	Dependencies	ETA	Status
WikiDev17 - Represent ArchCom on the WikiDev17 Planning Committee	WikiDev17 that improves on WikiDev16	Community Engineering, Product, Technology	EOQ	To do
Wikitext - Work with Parsing team on making the Wikitext spec clearer for wider interoperability, helping with complicated i18n issues	Ability to eventually deploy VisualEditor to all wikis, and having wider understanding of how Wikitext works	Parsing, Language	EOQ	To do

Performance & Availability

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.

Objective	Key result	Dependency	ETA	Status
Thumbor deployment	Serve 100% of production thumbnail traffic with Thumbor	Operations	EOQ	N Not done (partially done)
Active/Active datacenters	Lag spikes (> 5 sec) at 0/week for main databases Require HTTP POST for ?action=rollback Prevent pre-send write queries on page view Prevent pre-send master connections on page view	Design	EOQ	N Not done (partially done)
Save time performance	Deploy new AbuseFilter tree parser		EOQ	Done
Front-end performance	Continue critical rendering path optimisations. - task T127328 (Reuse of style modules; Remove top-bottom queue distinction) Support other teams and products.		EOQ	Done
ResourceLoader	Improve stability. Add support for modular package loading. - task T133462		EOQ	N Not done

Release Engineering

Goal setting process owner: Greg Grossmeier

All tracked in: #releng-201617-q2 - More details at Wikimedia Release Engineering Team/Goals/201617Q2

Objective	Key result	Dependency	Team members	ETA	Status	KPI (if applicable)
Address Technical Debt	Continuous Integration Perform an assessment of the current state of CI and outline a plan a future composition without disrupting expected services and performance. - task T153155	Ops (advice)	Antoine (lead) Chad Dan Mukunda Tyler	EOQ	Done
	Deployment tooling (Train 2.0) Migrate MediaWiki deploys to scap3 (part 1) Use a unified git repo for MW deploys - task T147478 Assess new directory structure and how it will interplay with MW Stretch goal: Replace rsync with git syncing	Ops (puppet)	Chad Dan Mukunda Tyler (lead)	EOQ	Done
Release MediaWiki 1.28	A quality MediaWiki 1.28 is successfully released - task T148087	Wikimedia / MediaWiki dev community	Chad (lead) Tyler	End of November	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

Goal setting process owner: Dario Taraborelli [ Wikimedia Research goals overview ]

Objective	Key result	Dependency	ETA	Status
FOCUS Revscoring	Implement probabilistic grammar for "vandalism", "spam", "attack", and "featured" sentences (T144636) Build new draft article quality model for splitting concerning creations ("spam", "vandalism", "attack") from OK drafts (T148038)	Editing (Collaboration)	EOQ	In progress
FOCUS Discussion modeling	Analyze the impact of personal attacks and aggression on editor retention (T127531) Paper submission	Formal collaboration (Jigsaw)	EOQ	In progress
FOCUS Reader segmentation research	Taxonomy of Wikipedia readers Taxonomy of Wikipedia articles with respect to the readership Paper submission and presentation of additional results.	Formal collaboration (GESIS)	EOQ	In progress
FOCUS WikiCite	Fundraise for and organize the 2017 event (to be held in Q4). (T144291)	Advancement (Foundations and Major Gifts)	EOQ	In progress
EXPERIMENT Stub recommendation	Formalize new research collaboration Expand research on recommender systems to stub expansion (Start)	Formal collaboration (EPFL)	EOQ	In progress

Design Research

Goal setting process owner: Abbey Ripstra [ Wikimedia Research goals overview ]

Objective	Key result	Dependency	ETA	Status
FOCUS New Reader research	Collaborate with New Readers core team on concept evaluation (against data from the field and with users we are building for) and iteration, focusing in on 1-3 concepts each for 2 of the 24 findings from research. T144016	Reading Global Reach Communications Community Engagement	end of Q2	Done
FOCUS New editor support	Provide concept development support for Edit Review Improvements project T137987 Perform and publish analysis of the quality of new editor support provided at Wikipedia Teahouse T132809 Perform and publish expanded analysis of the impact of Teahouse on new editor retention T127523	Research & Data Editing (Collaboration)	end of Q2	In progress
STRENGTHEN Design Research policy updates	Implement data audit process to ensure compliance with WMF data retention guidelines and privacy policy T143234 Draft general on-wiki privacy statement for design research user studies (generative and evaluative) T144641 Update user study consent forms T144642	Editing (design researcher) Reading (design researcher)	mid Q2	Done
EXPERIMENT Persona development	Work with various stake holders on how to use personas T141113	Product (designers, researchers, PMs, engineers)	end of Q2	Done

Security

Goal setting process owner: Darian Patrick

More details at Wikimedia Security Team/Goals 2016-2017#Q2_.28Oct-Dec_2016.29

Objective	Key result	Dependency	ETA	Status
Continue Security Team hiring process	Increase team capacity	Input from interview team	EOQ	N Not done
Onboard new Security Team members	Increase team capacity	Hiring completion	EOQ	N Not done
Improve automated scanning implementation	Increased utility of existing tools	Onboarding (unit on automated scanning)	EOQ	In progress

Services

Goal setting process owner: Gabriel Wicke

Objective	Key result	Dependency	ETA	Status
Reliably process events with EventBus & ChangeProp infrastructure.	Support at least three additional services. Candidates: Trending articles (reading) Push notifications (reading) Problematic edits (collaboration) Search updates (discovery)	Reading, Collaboration, Discovery	EOQ	Done
Provide infrastructure for ServiceWorker web frontend with support for offline, poor connectivity & caching of authenticated requests.	Production-worthy ServiceWorker proxy service. Demo of offline-enabled ServiceWorker frontend.	Performance, Reading	EOQ	Done

Under consideration:

• Protect sensitive user information (auth / sessions): Depends on outcome of discussion with operations.
• Productize PDF render service: On track for deployment towards end of Q1, likely little work in Q2.

Technical Operations

Team	Objective	Key result	Dependency	ETA	Status
Core Ops	Experiment with Kubernetes for services in production	Install kubernetes in production, experimenting with Calico for networking Create a network entry point for serving the outside world Stretch: Decide a model for authentication/authorization N Not done Stretch: Implement a container image registry		EOQ	Done
	Replace Ganglia with Prometheus	Machine-level metrics collected into Prometheus from all production machines Migrate software metrics from Ganglia Implement Ganglia-like cluster dashboard Make Ganglia deprecated		EOQ	Done
Labs	Upgrade Labs DB replica service and introduce High Availability	Initial setup and provision of labsdb1009, labsdb1010 and labsdb1011 Implement a frontend failover solution for labsdb replicas Provide at least 2 separate service endpoints: one for slow, long running queries; and another for quick, web requests Provision with data the new labsdb servers and provide replica service with at least 1 shard from a sanitized copy from production	Core Ops (DBAs)	EOQ	Done
Traffic	Finish Varnish 4 migration	Upgrade text cluster to Varnish 4		EOQ	Done
	Complete a valid, workable design for a standardized A/B test infrastructure	Design Document	Analytics	EOQ	N Not done