Wikimedia Platform Engineering

The Platform Engineering team at Wikimedia Foundation was responsible for the MediaWiki core, managing work from volunteer developers, as well as for providing services that are used by other teams. The Platform Engineering team was managed by Rob Lanphier. It was part of Wikimedia Foundation's Engineering department.

See also a series of articles presenting the Platform engineering group:


Team

Responsibilities

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  • Improve the stability, security, performance and architectural cleanliness of MediaWiki
  • Ensure that MediaWiki core is meeting the evolving needs of the website
  • Develop and document a clear set of APIs so that external developers can create applications that easily interface with MediaWiki

Current activities

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Main projects

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Continuous responsibilities

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Planned or backburner projects

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Recently completed projects

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Responsibilities

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The Release Engineering team is responsible for the tooling and resources that help MediaWiki developers write better code and get that code out for our users faster.

Team

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Current activities

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Planned or backburner projects

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Team

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Responsibilities

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The Multimedia team is responsible for features that provide a richer experience and support more media contributions on Wikipedia, Commons, and MediaWiki sites.

We develop features to:

  • improve the viewing experience for our readers
  • develop feedback and curation tools
  • help editors add media files to articles.

We are also upgrading our current infrastructure to:

  • improve the upload pipeline
  • implement structured data
  • better integrate multimedia across all our sites.

Current activities

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Overview

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Main projects

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At this time, our two main projects are:

  • Media Viewer, an immersive multimedia browser; and
  • UploadWizard, an incremental upgrade and code refactoring of our contribution pipeline.

Next projects

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Here is our Multimedia Vision for 2016, to give you a sense of what we are working on this year. In coming months, we will be working on a variety of projects to help our users view, contribute, curate and use images, sound and video files. We believe that audio-visual media offer a unique opportunity to engage a wide range of users to participate productively in our collective work.

Responsibilities

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  • Attract and support volunteer technologists so that they can become an even more powerful force in driving improvement on the website
  • Help nurture volunteer-developed extensions and widgets
  • Provide communications support for all groups in the engineering department
  • Develop clear documentation for MediaWiki so that new staff, volunteer developers and external users have a smooth ramp-up process to becoming MediaWiki developers

Team

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Some activities around 2014 to 2016

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See also Engineering Community team meetings.

Planned or backburner projects

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Extended content