Wikimedia Search Team/Meeting minutes/2015-06-01

Checkins

James

• Starting adding event logging to portal
  • Doesn’t use standard platform, so some IE8 issues
  • It is a page on meta, so someone (ops?) will have to update that page to deploy it

Moiz

• Working on doc: How can we gather search quality feedback from users (look at how others have done it, and how we have done it in the past)
• For expediency, should use qualtrix
• (Notetaker missed second thing Moiz is working on)

Max

• Working with new server. Some issues.
• Then will return to adding labels, new queries
• Need to prep for upcoming conference

Yuri

• Worked on supporting vector tile maps on the new server. Code got deployed.
• Did a lot of communications with community. Prep for this weekend’s map conference.

Tomasz

• Will create a phab ticket for metrics needs
• Will work with Wes on hiring/budget

Dan

• Was mostly off last week
• Productive talks at hackathon about WDQS
• Working on a WD presentation

Nik

• Progress on query string replacement, but not much lately
• Focused on onboarding the next 2 Mondays
• Needs to work on nasty bug with jobs that is breaking tests (and probably causing production weirdness)

Stas

• Working on bugs/performance of WDQS. Got help from blazegraph. Not as fast as we want, but no longer “catastrophic”
• Will work on more substantial features. Improve logging.

Wes

• Navigating budget changes. Keep things moving forward. Will summarize when it is final.
  • Reductions in hardware purchases.
  • Focus our asks to external funding options
  • Headcount down to +3 (UX, DA, Relevancy eng)
• Hackathon was great
  • Would like to have a followup in a separate meeting
  • Yuri did great showing off maps (and graphs)
  • Will meet w/Rachel to help us get the word out to community
  • Working on expectations of UX and metrics
  • Developing simple high-level doc of goals, progress, etc. Should probably go on wiki.

Giuseppe

• Nothing to report

Oliver (via email):

• Did
  • 1. Began research into user-perceived accuracy measurements (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100672) much papers, many wow.
  • 2. Studied queries per search sessions (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T99584) concluding that this is actually impossible under the current schema. We'll need a new one for it. Luckily we also need a new schema for something else, so we can probably bind them together.
  • 3. Hiring. One more interview (and another today) along with much scrubbing of the candidate pool and a pile of technical task reviews.
  • 4. /Hopefully/ finished off the NSA data support. They keep coming up with new requests; I keep smiling sweetly and telling them that the readership team will certainly be interested in those questions and that's who they should be talking to.
  • 5. Worked through various dashboard bugs
    • https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100049,
    • https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100055,
    • https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100056.
• Upcoming:
  • 1. Research around user-perceived accuracy measurements (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100672)
  • 2. Monthly Metrics support if we decide metrics is a thing we're doing.
  • 3. Defining a new EL schema that solves (at least partially) for 1 and 2 above.
  • 4. Reaching out to design research about understanding our user base.
  • 5. Reconfiguring our dashboarding service to support multiple, distinct services. This won't actually be useful until we have the data from 3 and from the EL schema currently on engineering's plate (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T100673)

Scrum of Scrums

• Anything from SoS that we should be aware of?
  • Analytics doing heavy A/B testing, so “take it easy” on event logging for next 10 days
  • Some concerns about event logging servers overload
    • Kevin and Dan will talk to firm up our requirements
• Are we blocked?
  • No
• Are we blocking? https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/blocked-on-search/
  • No

Info/To Discuss

From last week

• How much of our new Java developer will go to WDQS?
• Oliver proposes that all logging should go to the analytics cluster
  • Examples: Elastic, WDQS.
  • Need to spread the knowledge of how to do it (Oliver will coach Stas)
  • Nik: Should elastic go to kibana? KS to follow up

Any reports from the Hackathon? Should we schedule a meeting just for that?

• Wes will set up

How can we have a maps presence at wikimania (since it wasn’t accepted)

• At hackathon segment, but that’s just technical
• Reach out to organizers to find out how we can

FYI

• OpenStreetMaps conference this weekend which some folks will attend
• Some folks will attend the Open Air conf Thursday June 4 (SF)
• Kevin is giving Kanban tech talk June 15
• Wikimania (July 15-19)
  • (need to insert relevant team page here)