Talk:Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee/Talking: 2024

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The number of times "wiki" was mentioned.[edit]

Outside of "Wikimedia", and not counting image captions.

  • 3 times in the phrase "on- and off-wiki".
  • Once as part of the phrase 'smaller wiki communities'.
  • Once in the phrase "on-wiki and in other digital forums".
  • Once as part of the name "Mediawiki".
  • Five times as part of "Wikipedia".

TomDotGov (talk) 18:18, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hey @TomDotGov, thanks for reviewing the page and leaving a comment here at wiki speed, that's Hawaiian for quick. Let us know if you'd like to take part in the conversation. MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 19:52, 13 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Correction needed: T:28 email this user (check with Preferences)[edit]

Kindly confirm that on recepients' side and their actions.

  • Preferences -> Nitofication -> Notify me about these events:

You are supposed to:

  • turn on Email from other user. The present text refers to senders' action.

The segment it affects is T:28, or output in /ja as:

-- Omotecho (talk) 09:45, 17 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Thanks. I've fixed that link and clarified the preference label. --Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 20:20, 26 October 2023 (UTC)[reply]

On-wiki option[edit]

You can sign up for on- and off-wiki options between October and February. However, as far as I can see Wikimedia Foundation Community Affairs Committee/Talking: 2024/Interested is only for signing up for off-wiki meeting. So where can I sign up for on-wiki options? Or where can I leave my opinion? Thanks. SCP-2000 17:51, 21 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Hi @SCP-2000, you're in the right place ...and the first to the party. Folks have so far been interested in calls. Warmly inviting you to start an on-wiki conversation here and to share your thoughts. In particular, what's on your mind when it comes to big questions facing the future of our movement now? MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 19:15, 21 November 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Discussion questions[edit]

1. Given future projections of continued reduced direct web traffic and banner / online fundraising not growing as previous, what should be our long-term financial model to match our aspirations?

2. The Foundation's Product and Technology department works on many areas of technology needs to support Wikimedia contributors (from newcomers to editors with extended rights), readers, and institutional partners. What are the main technology topics on your mind right now – in Wikimedia and beyond?

3. As a movement built on the strength of collaboration and crowdsourcing, what is the best division of labor to achieve our goals? In other words, how should we define the Foundation's core roles and responsibilities in the movement?
-MPourzaki (WMF) (talk) 21:38, 5 December 2023 (UTC)[reply]

Every piece of software should have a team/maintainer assigned[edit]

Hey there. I am a bit busy this month so probably don't have time for a call. But I appreciate this initiative to talk to the volunteers. My biggest suggestion for this year is:

For annual planning, I'd like to see software maintenance prioritized. In particular, I'd like to see us move towards having every WMF-deployed extension/skin/library having a software team that owns it and that is signed up as a "watcher" on the corresponding Phabricator tag. Every piece of software should have an assigned team/maintainer. We can measure our progress of this by taking a look at pages such as mw:Developers/Maintainers.

Right now I think developers "pitch in" to put out fires, but that a lot of important software is essentially abandonware. In the long term, new software teams probably need to be created and then assigned responsibility of some of these unassigned tools.

Prioritizing software keeps money within the movement rather than spending it outside the movement, and also most software is cross-wiki rather than for an individual wiki. These are two aspects of prioritizing software that should make it a community relations win.

At any software-centric organization, it is tempting to task software engineers to work mainly on new software and new features, but maintenance and bug reports and w:technical debt is also very important. Perhaps more important when you already have software that people like and find useful.

That's all for now. Hope this helps. Have a great day. –Novem Linguae (talk) 19:43, 7 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Furthermore, I would like to suggest that WMF should reconsider the decision to permanently close the Technology Fund and provide more support to volunteer developers generally. There are some features and software development that can be actually be done by volunteer developers. However, currently there is only the Rapid Fund for small-scale software development instead of long term. This means that they can only develop or improve a small project / feature.
There were also some valuable points mentioned in the previous discussion. Thanks. SCP-2000 15:01, 14 February 2024 (UTC)[reply]
I agree with this in principle, but given a choice between "no team supports this, but it's stable and useful, so we keep it" and "no team supports this, so we remove it even though it's stable and useful", I'd pick functionality over a pretty spreadsheet.
I think the bigger issue is that maintenance is underrated (until something inevitably breaks). The goals are about the new shiny toy; they are never about fixing little problems or solving ticking time bombs. For example: Devs have been concerned about CAPTCHAs for 15 years (that I know of; maybe longer than that). Is it fixed? No. Has any team seriously considered fixing it? No. Has any team even said that fixing it is definitely their responsibility? No. Will it get fixed without an Act of Congress? I wouldn't count on it.
There's been talk in the past about Product teams taking a quarter to do "invisible" work – not exactly "backlog", which often includes ideas for future expansions of products, but all those nagging things that need to be done and don't ever appear in the team's quarterly goals, like replacing "temporary" work-arounds. I think the problem is that this doesn't sound like progress, so if you're on the board, "Let's spend a quarter of this year's budget making things 1% better internally" just doesn't sound inspiring. (@TTaylor (WMF), I don't know if the Tech teams ever talked about something similar, but it would presumably have to be modified for some teams, because daily operations needs to happen 24x365.) WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:09, 3 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Propose move to correct name[edit]

The current name of this page is

it should be

Any problem to move it? I am not sure what moving it could disrupt. If this program repeats in future years, then having the name in the correct format helps. Bluerasberry (talk) 20:04, 22 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]

Hi Bluerasberry! Thanks for your input. Why should the page be moved to that format? RAdimer-WMF (talk) 15:08, 27 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
@RAdimer-WMF: Of all the Wikimedia page titles that use colons, the ratio is a million to one for no space after the colon versus otherwise, so no space is the norm.
I think the intended benefit gained here is aesthetics.
It probably does not matter too much but the space gave me pause copyediting elsewhere. Bluerasberry (talk) 14:09, 28 March 2024 (UTC)[reply]
Okay, that makes sense. We don't have issues with moving it. Best, RAdimer-WMF (talk) 15:16, 5 April 2024 (UTC)[reply]
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