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Product and Technology Advisory Council/May 2026 draft PTAC recommendation for feedback

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May 2026 Recommendation for feedback

A Model for Affiliates to Support Contributors Through Tools

Affiliates can contribute to their communities by maintaining tools, improving documentation, and making tools easier to find.

Context

Over the years, many affiliates and hubs have expressed interest in contributing to the technical side of Wikimedia projects. However, there is no simple, consistent way for affiliates to identify contributors' needs, decide what to prioritize, and coordinate work with contributors.

This contributes to fragmentation in the tool ecosystem, as contributors are often unable to use existing ones due to language barriers, insufficient documentation, and the creation of new tools when old ones could be improved. The Wikimedia Foundation also lacks clarity about which technical projects to fund in the affiliate space that align with volunteer contributors' needs and the Foundation's priorities.

As a result, the Product and Technology Advisory Council would like to recommend the WMF support affiliates in implementing an operating model similar to that used by the Wikimedia CEE Hub. We believe this will unlock capacity among affiliates to strategically distribute work and better meet the community's needs, while giving them the right tools to demonstrate impact and alignment with the Wikimedia Foundation.

Key components of this model

  • Identifying clear problems and solutions with high impact: Effective tools all start with a real community-specific problem and provide high-impact solutions. Identifying these problems involves relying on surveys, listening sessions, direct outreach, and analysis of data (such as usage patterns, access barriers, and technical constraints) that are appropriate for local contexts and challenges and that, in combination, build signals of demand. Other sources of demand information include Phabricator, the Community Wishlist, and so on.
  • Strong communication with the community: Affiliates communicate with constituent communities through technical Village Pumps or similar community discussion spaces. Such communication is crucial to ensure community support and adoption of the tool being developed.
  • A coordination structure: A small working group provides structure, focus, and continuity to such initiatives. The team works to understand the community's needs, prioritize them, and coordinate with technical contributors to improve the most needed tools. Having long-term technical contributors on such working groups can often help navigate complex areas of Wikimedia's technical landscape.
  • Transparent prioritization: Priorities are published, decisions are documented, and updates are shared. Doing so builds trust and prevents the perception of arbitrary choices. WMF has recently updated its prioritization rubric for community wishes and other community requests, which may be used by affiliates if helpful.
  • Find tools that already exist: Often, tools already exist to meet local contributors’ needs, but not in the language they need them. The most efficient tool provision will focus on finding and translating tools where possible, rather than building new ones, and will only resort to building new tools when there isn't any existing tool that could serve the community with little or no modification.
  • Strengthen localization, accessibility, and responsiveness: Many tools cannot be localized or adapted without substantial investment. Effective tool provision involves using and improving localization frameworks, translation pipelines (such as TranslateWiki), and community-driven customization layers, so tool interfaces and workflows can be adapted without redevelopment. At the same time, ensure tools being developed are accessible (e.g., usable with assistive technologies, clear navigation, inclusive design) and responsive across devices, so contributors can use them regardless of ability, bandwidth, or screen sizes.
  • Invest in documentation and translation: Tool adoption often fails not because tools don't exist, but because they're hard to find or hard to understand. Investing in better documentation, examples, and tutorials (including videos), as well as improved discoverability in local languages, significantly lowers the barrier to discovering the tool and adoption across communities.
  • Follow Wikimedia software development guidelines: Any tool-building effort will follow Wikimedia software development guidelines regarding security, user safety, and infrastructure load. For example, respect the Robot policy when making requests to Wikimedia servers, open-source all code deployed on Wikimedia servers, and refrain from storing non-public user data on Toolforge.
  • Refrain from developing new MediaWiki extensions, core MediaWiki code, or production services without Wikimedia Foundation buy-in: Deploying a new MediaWiki extension or core feature is currently an extremely complex and time-consuming process that requires sign-off from multiple teams (for example, the Product Safety and Integrity team and the Site Reliability Engineering team) and requires a WMF team to commit to stewarding the code for the long term. As such, it is easier to build and deploy Toolforge tools or gadgets.

The CEE Hub Model as an example

The CEE Hub established a Technical Advancement Working Group to better understand how tools are used across the CEE region and to identify the biggest gaps. The goal was to identify the most pressing needs and prioritize tools and gadgets that would have the greatest impact for local communities.

The process began in May 2024 with a survey on tool usage and needs in the region. The survey received 44 responses from 20 community members. Based on these insights, a seven-member volunteer working group held a series of online meetings to determine which tools to focus on. They also followed up directly with survey participants to better understand their challenges and ideas for improvement.

The survey revealed that respondents use tools in their Wikimedia work, or at least attempt to. However, the tools are often difficult to discover, and documentation is limited, with few examples or practical guides (video tutorials were specifically suggested as helpful). They found that many tools already existed that met their communities’ needs, but that these tools remained largely unknown to local communities.

Based on these findings, the Wikimedia CEE Hub invested in gathering community feedback on technical fixes that might be required to Cat-a-lot, a widely used gadget in the CEE language wikis, and improving the discoverability of such tools in the CEE community in 2025 with a recommended tool list.

The Product and Technology Advisory Council invites feedback on this recommendation until May 15. Please use the the talk page to provide feedback.

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