Product and Technology Advisory Council/February 2025 draft PTAC recommendation for feedback
The Product and Technology Advisory Council (PTAC) is a group of Wikimedia Foundation staff and community members that work together to co-define a more resilient, future-proof technological platform. PTAC's first in-person meeting was held in late January in Portland, Oregon, USA.
PTAC is a one-year experiment 🧪. The goal is to create a repeatable process going forward to make recommendations for the product and technology development over a multi-year horizon and to align to the strategic direction of the Foundation. This is not meant to replace the Community Wishlist, which focuses on bug fixes and immediate improvements.
In January, we met together over three days to discuss how best to allocate $300,000 to $500,000 in funding for use by the product and technology department. In that discussion, we looked at data and trends and explored the potential value of different strategic directions. We asked ourselves a question: what does the movement most need from us right now to advance the mission? There are a lot of areas that could be improved in the product, but in a constrained resource environment, we focused on what we believe is most needed at this moment.
We explored four topics:
- Mobile experiences,
- New editor experiences,
- Administrator growth and satisfaction, and
- Image upload.
The first two topics were particular areas of interest for the group, and so we have prepared short outlines reflecting our thinking in these two areas.
While all these choices have value, we identified mobile experiences as having the greatest potential impact, with particular emphasis on mobile contributions. PTAC recommends that improving mobile contribution experiences has the greatest potential to bring in new and unheard voices onto Wikipedia and sister projects, and will improve the experience of readers and contributors most widely.
This recommendation will inform work that will be included in the fiscal year 2025-2026 Annual Plan. This practically means that work related to this recommendation will be scoped and resources allocated to it in this new financial year. To be scoped into the annual plan and work of teams, we are requesting feedback and discussion on this proposal by 21 February.
What is this recommendation? And what does it mean?
[edit]For fiscal year 2025–2026, we recommend using the funds we are tasked with allocating for improving the mobile contributor experience. We recommend that the funds we are tasked with prioritizing go towards WMF product and technology teams' research and implementation of initiatives to enable mobile contributors, as we believe this is the most high-impact way to further the Wikimedia mission. This will inform prioritization and decision making by product and technology teams in the upcoming fiscal year.
This recommendation is currently in a draft stage, and we invite feedback and discussion before we finalize it on 21 February. While we do not intend to change our choice of mobile contribution experiences as this group's priority for this planning cycle, we welcome feedback on how to enrich this proposal to best reflect the needs and priorities from the global Wikimedia community.
- Do you have concerns about prioritizing mobile experiences?
- How can we refine this draft recommendation?
- Is there something else we missed and we should include in next year's discussion?
Please leave feedback on the talk page.
What are the trade-offs we had to make?
[edit]Resources are limited and while WMF product & technology teams will continue to work in all four areas, selecting mobile experiences as a priority means that the resources PTAC is in charge of allocating will be more narrowly used to accelerate work in this area.
New editors are the lifeblood of Wikipedia and the sister projects, and while there are large overlaps between our recommendation and improving the experience of new editors, we believe that better mobile experiences will enable us to attract new editors and will improve the experience of the broadest range of editors.
Image uploading is a longstanding poor user experience, however we believe it is unlikely to have the same level of impact as prioritizing mobile experiences.
Growing the number of administrators and improving administrator satisfaction has significant value given their critical role on the projects. However, an administrator is very far along the volunteer's journey that starts as a reader, and the data reviewed by PTAC makes it clear that mobile represents the greatest pool of readers and potential new contributors. Through focusing on improving the mobile experience, the expectation is this includes improving administrator satisfaction and workflows.