Wikimedia Technology/Annual Plans/FY2019
The Technology Department has a number of annual goals in support of the Wikimedia Foundation's Annual Plan; this work is detailed in the Annual Plan. Our remaining work falls into four broad areas—foundational, sustaining, supporting our technical community, and supporting the overall community health.
Our Foundational work enhances the underlying technical platform and service capabilities that the Wikimedia Movement depends on. In the next fiscal year, we will move to support the Movement’s new strategy by investing in and purposefully evolving our software platform. We will provide the technical underpinnings of the Foundation’s online fundraising campaigns while partnering with the Advancement team and responding to new opportunities in the global philanthropic landscape. We will improve our search platform with natural language processing (NLP) and more specific language analyzers.
- Read more: TEC2: Modern Event Platform, TEC8: Search Platform, TEC11: Support Fundraising Activities, CDP2: Platform Evolution, and CDP4: Structured Data Program.
Our Sustaining work includes operating and maintaining all Wikimedia sites and their related server and network infrastructure. Work this year will include modernizing our analytics infrastructure — to make our analytical data as discoverable as it can be for our Wikimedia communities and Foundation staff; improving how we deploy new code; and migrating our runtime to PHP 7. We will improve testing tools by defining and monitoring code health metrics alongside fixing long-standing critical bugs. We will reduce the accumulated technical debt that makes our software stack expensive to maintain and develop on. We will also increase performance testing for mobile apps and mobile web, and we will address long-standing gaps in the sustainability of our teams.
- Read more: TEC1: Reliability, Performance, and Maintenance, TEC3: Deployment Pipeline, TEC4: PHP7 Migration, TEC6: Address Infrastructure Gaps, TEC13: Code Health, and CDP1: Privacy, Security, and Data Management.
We will increase our Support for, and empowerment of, our Technical Community, with a focus on making MediaWiki software and Wikimedia services more accessible to our developers, volunteers and third party developers. Major new work includes lowering the barriers to participating in MediaWiki development through easier installations, better hosted tools, and more documentation; recruiting and mentoring new volunteers while supporting our existing communities with improved communications tools and hackathons; and inviting wider participation in long-term decision making though the Technical Committee and the annual Developer Summit conference. A Developer Relations program will engage and empower volunteers who build innovative solutions for Movement issues and concerns, using our APIs and data. We will generate new kinds of data with machine learning, share more data via Wikistats 2, and make the Wikipedia text corpus available for analytics purposes.
We will also devote resources in Supporting our Community of contributors. In addition to our Knowledge Equity work described above, we will produce an environmental impact report of our operations. We will also provide tools to identify and close gaps in knowledge in underserved communities.