Community Tech

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The Community Tech is a Wikimedia Foundation team running the Community Wishlist Survey. It builds and improves curation and moderation tools for experienced users, supports bot operators, and more. The creation of the team is a direct outcome of requests from core contributors. The team works closely with editors, volunteer developers, and other Wikimedia teams.

For the latest news on our projects:

Team[edit]

Projects[edit]

Upcoming[edit]

Ongoing[edit]

Past[edit]

Proposal and prioritization process[edit]

The main prioritization process for the Community Tech team is the cross-project Community Wishlist Survey. It's an annual project which invites contributors from all Wikimedia wikis to propose and support the changes that they would most like to see.

The team also takes on occasional projects to help smaller groups that may not have enough support in the Survey. For a more detailed breakdown of the team's current work, check our most recent Kanban board.

Scope[edit]

The team mainly works on development tasks that can be iterated on quickly and that have a direct benefit for the most active contributors who participate in the curatorial and administrative layers of the Wikimedia projects, as well as contributors who work on technical features for the projects such as templates, modules, gadgets, user scripts, and bots.

Tasks that are in scope include (but are not limited to):

  • Creating gadgets, bots, and wizards to streamline existing community workflows
  • Modifying existing gadgets and bots so that they can work across multiple projects
  • Converting heavily-used gadgets and user-scripts into MediaWiki extensions
  • Building article curation and monitoring tools for WikiProjects
  • Identifying and fixing issues with critical power-user tools that have already been developed, but are not actively maintained, such as AbuseFilter or Citation bot
  • Creating better documentation for power-user tools and features so that they can be better utilized across all projects

Tasks that are not in scope include:

  • Maintaining orphaned/abandoned projects from other WMF teams.
  • Supporting internal needs of WMF teams.
  • Large, long-term development projects like converting Commons to use structured meta-data or creating an entirely new watchlist interface.
  • Being the point of contact for all community technical requests.
  • Sysadmin type tasks such as managing Toolforge, improving site performance, creating new wikis, managing IRC channels, etc.

Collaboration[edit]

The Community Tech team has a similar mandate to Wikimedia Deutschland's Community Tech team – Technischer Communitybedarf, or TCB – which provides technical assistance and software development for the German Wikimedia community. We will be collaborating with them on projects that overlap between our teams and assisting each other with technical assessment and code review. We will also be collaborating with other WMF development teams when high-priority community requests fall within their scope. In such cases, we will work with the leaders of the other teams to negotiate timelines, expectations, priorities, and ownership. We also spend a good deal of our time working with and supporting Wikimedia volunteer developers.

Guidelines[edit]

It's important to us...

  • To work on projects that have a big impact
  • To help large wikis and small wikis, in many languages
  • To be open and communicative
  • To be responsive to people's requests and concerns
  • To be calm and civil, and to assume good faith

We're a small team, and there's a lot to do! We want to be as helpful and effective as we can, so we can't take everything on. Saying no to requests that we can't help with is an important part of our job, because it frees up time and energy for the requests that we can help with.

But "no" is hard to hear sometimes, so here are some guidelines about working and communicating with the Community Tech team.

  • Please be calm and civil, and assume good faith on our part. We care about the projects too.
  • We love our jobs and we work hard, but we don't work 24/7, and we can't guarantee an immediate response.
  • If a specific person or issue is taking an outsized percentage of our on-wiki time, that takes time and attention away from other people. We'll sometimes have to close a conversation, and say that we can't spend more time on a particular subject.
  • We can't take on projects that are currently on another product team's roadmap, or a project that directly conflicts with another team's work.
  • If there's an issue with another product team's work, we can direct you to the appropriate person to talk to.
  • We can't answer questions about staffing issues, or confidential matters.

The Community Tech team is committed to upholding the civility standards set by the Terms of Use and will observe and maintain the friendly space expectations for Grants spaces in our interactions. We ask that all contributors to Community Tech spaces do the same.

Links[edit]


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