WMDE Technical Wishes/Approach
About the project
[edit]The Technical Wishes project is an approach to identify and prioritize technical needs in a collaborative way.
The team aims to:
- focus on building new and improved features in MediaWiki
- serve diverse users across wikis
- work problem-oriented instead of solution-oriented
Core element of the Technical Wishes Project is the Technical Wishlist, containing tasks resulting from the Technical Wishes surveys, but also from workshops. So far the Technical Wishes survey has been conducted on German Wikipedia in 2013, 2015, 2017, 2019 and 2020. The survey has been a initiative by the community from the start, developed into a collaboration beetween the German-speaking communities, the WMDE software development department and many other people who support the Technical Wishes Project with their ideas, technical requests and discussion of requests. Starting 2019, the Technical Wishes project will focus on solving problems from topic areas that the community votes for in a survey.
Although the first ideas for new projects come from the German-speaking communities, software development for the Wikimedia projects is global and contributors of all language projects should benefit from improved or new features that come out of the Technical Wishes project. Therefore, research, feedback rounds or conversations to learn more about a problem are not only conducted on deWP, but take place on Meta, and at international events like Wikimania or Hackathon. Once a feature reaches the beta status, the central help and feedback page will be set up on MediaWiki.org.
The Technical Wishlist of the German-speaking communities is not the same as the International Community Wishlist. Nevertheless, there is overlap between the two wishlists and the WMDE team is working in close collaboration with the Wikimedia Foundation's tech teams.
Addressing diverse users' needs
[edit]Currently we work with the following list of criteria to address diverse users' needs:
List of Criteria
[edit]Different levels of experience (e.g. new and long-term contributors, tech-savvy users ...) |
|
Non-Latin scripts | |
Different browsers |
|
Different skins |
Support of |
Different devices |
|
Visual impairments | |
Physical impairments |
With more resources and increasing knowledge, we could do more -> we continue exploring potential topics/issues in this area.
Further Reading
[edit]- Accessibility guide for developers
- Wikimedia Design Style Guide
- Lessons learned from developing a RTL-accessible feature in MediaWiki
- Reaching Diversity through Technology (session slides)
- Translation guideline for developers
- Building tools for diverse users. Lessons learned from the Technical Wishes project
- ... (wip)