Community Tech

Community Tech manages the Community Wishlist, a forum for contributors from all Wikimedia projects to suggest and comment on product and technology changes and improvements.

We leverage the Wishlist to collaborate with editors, volunteer developers, and other Wikimedia teams to turn community-identified needs into real solutions, and work on priority wishes.

✨ Make a Wish or support Wishlist ideas

The team

Jack Wheeler

Lead Community Tech Manager

Karolin Siebert

Engineering Manager

Cormac Parle

Principal Software Engineer

Dayllan Maza

Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead

Tim Starling

Principal Software Architect

Joydeep Sengupta

Principal User Experience Designer

Harumi Monroy

Senior Software Engineer

MusikAnimal

Staff Software Engineer

Sam Wilson

Staff Software Engineer

TheresNoTime

Software Engineer

Dom Walden

Test Engineer

George Mikesell

Test Engineer

Luca Martinelli [Sannita]

Movement Communications Specialist

🛠️ How We Work

We are a small team with limited resources, and balance our efforts across three categories:

Building tooling to advance the Community Wishlist
Maintenance of existing tools and features supported by the Community Tech team
Delivering on wishes, primarily by adopting Focus Areas supported by volunteers.

When we say "no" to a given request, we are merely stating it goes against our current priorities.

When working and communicating with us:

Please be calm, civil, and assume we’re working in good faith.
We aim to respond promptly but can't guarantee immediate replies.
Sometimes, we may need to close a conversation if it takes too much of our time or attention.
We can not handle projects on another team's roadmap or ones that conflict with their work, but we will direct you to the right person when possible.
We can not discuss staffing or confidential issues.

Current selected projects

Community Tech is currently wrapping up carry-over work from the 2023 Wishlist. Beginning in 2024-25, the team will adopt community-supported Focus Areas via the new Community Wishlist.

Projects	Project status
Multiblocks	In development
Sharing QR codes	Done
Edit-Recovery Feature	Done
Template recall and discovery	In development

📢 Latest Updates

June 18, 2025: Results of our last Wishathon sprint

Hello everyone! We wanted to share with you the results of the recently closed “Wishathon”, our internal hackathon organized by Community Tech to help fulfill more wishes from Community Wishlist.

The Wishathon, which ran from Monday 19 to Friday 23 May, engaged Wikimedia Foundation staff to help fulfill more wishes, and also foster cross-team and cross-departmental collaboration.

22 patches were written during the week, of which 4 were already merged. This allowed us to grant three wishes from the community, and we have a clearer path ahead for five more wishes.

The wishes granted through our Wishathon include:

Filing a patch to introduce the ability to set default watchlist expiries (phab:T265716; thanks to This, that and the other, MusikAnimal, and Susana Cardenas Molinar)
Fixing a bug that prevented the “[show/hide]” dropdown button of the navigational boxes to be shown by the “edit preview” reload button (phab:T315894, which came also with phab:T394078 to be fixed first; thanks to Sam Wilson and Joydeep Sengupta)
Filing seven different patches to the CSS sanitizer (phab:T324526, phab:T394619, phab:T277755, phab:T360725, phab:T368089, phab:T293633, and phab:T371809) that are awaiting code review at the moment, plus a couple more ideas to be evaluated (phab:T394963 and phab:T394964; thanks to Tim Starling and MusikAnimal)

In addition to that, we also worked on the following tasks and wishes:

Improved the way translation on discussion pages of wishes work (phab:T295862 and phab:T363306; thanks to Nik Gkountas and Joydeep Sengupta)
Realising a functional prototype to select templates by categories, related to Template recall and discovery (phab:T392553, thanks to Sam Wilson)
Completing the design and WIP implementation to revamp pagination of page navigation (phab:T394637, thanks to Michelle Horsey and Bárbara Martínez)
Improved the modules of the Wikimedia Dashboard (thanks to Arina Igumenshcheva, Dayllan Maza, Harumi Monroy, Jack Wheeler, Julieta Fernandez, and Katherine Graessle)

As you can see, wishes are very different in complexity and feasibility, so in some cases (such as the “[show/hide]” dropdown button and the CSS sanitizer) we were able to resolve all or at least most of the it, others (such as the Wikimedia Dashboard modules) are more experimental in nature, and we could only do some improvements without resolving it completely. Our work will be used to guide the direction of teams in this regard.

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Further information