Wikimedia Foundation/Communications/Movement Communications/Meta-Wiki presence/Updates

Update 4 - May 2024

We have now published a number of department and team pages as part of this project. These pages complement the top-level nav resource pages we linked to in our previous update. We encourage interested people to take a look at the different department pages available, using them to navigate to team pages:

Our goal with these updates is to better showcase the people doing the work in a way that is clear, functional, and easy to maintain. We wanted to show who is working on what, and provide community members clear pathways to connect with the leaders and community-facing staff who are working on projects that interest them. In addition to listing staff on each team and department page together with the work they do, we have also compiled the listings into an organizational chart for a quick birdseye view. It felt important to bring this information to Meta (rather than only focusing on updating the Foundation website), which makes the information both easier to update and easier to find.

As we have been developing these pages, we have also been working towards improving coordination and consistency in staff listings overall. For a host of reasons – including privacy requirements around some roles and the large administrative burden around keeping a listing of nearly 700 people fully up to date with titles, reporting structures, etc – we are opting for a more strategic listing of people that community members and external audiences may want and need to connect with. We are also implementing a process for keeping these listings and pages up to date on a quarterly basis so that they continue to stay relevant and useful. Plus a highly-visible Contact Us page where people can send any or all requests to be triaged, without needing to know who to direct the question to.

The current staff listing on the Foundation website, which has fallen out of date, will be updated to reflect the information that is kept up to date on an ongoing basis on Meta; the main source will continue to live on Meta.

In terms of next steps for this project, we will continue to put up more departments and teams in the coming weeks. We will then begin our quarterly reviews of pages to ensure they are kept up to date. We will also start working toward the next round of design improvements, including improving the mobile view.

Update 3 - March 2024

Hi! This is our third update, sharing our work in the new year so far.

We've published four new pages on Meta-Wiki, updating the main Wikimedia Foundation page and providing links to resources and contact information:

We are very interested in your feedback on these pages, and what we could add or remove to provide what you're looking for when you visit Wikimedia Foundation pages on Meta-Wiki.

Update 2 - December 2023

Hello! We wanted to share an update on our work since April.

We’ve completed our design phase, and have moved the templates to Meta-Wiki. We also have a set of demo pages to showcase how these templates look and work in practice:

If you have feedback or questions about the demo pages, please ask on our project’s talk page!

From our previous update on the answers@ workflow, we updated the Answers portal in July and August, which will be integrated into the new set of pages.

We are also continuing to work towards gathering and preparing departments’ and teams’ content for publishing on their new Meta-Wiki pages.

Update 1 – April 2023

Hi all! This is the first update for our Meta presence project, providing information on what we've accomplished so far.

We set out with the goal of rethinking and redesigning the Wikimedia Foundation's presence on Meta-Wiki.

At this point, we have nearly completed our design phase, with a strong set of page designs and templates prepared on a staging wiki. This array of new designs includes a central Foundation page (the "front door"), department pages, team pages, and user pages. This phase also includes part of our internal information gathering steps, communicating across the Foundation to gather content from departments and teams.

Additionally, Movement Communications has taken ownership of the answers@ workflow, which will be highlighted as a single point of contact in the new Foundation Meta-Wiki pages system.

What are our next steps?

First of all, this update! We're here to communicate with you about our project's plans and implementation. After our internal work is complete, we'll work towards importing the prepared templates to Meta-Wiki and develop demo pages, which we will use for testing/prep and to gather feedback. From there, the next step is implementation of the new page system on a rolling/gradual basis. We do not have any specific timelines as of yet, but will keep you updated here.

With additional questions, please feel free to ask on the project's talk page.