Wikimedia Conference 2014/Documentation/25

25 Lessons learned in huge projects: Wikidata

Speakers: Lydia Pintscher (WMDE), Abraham Taherivand (WMDE)

tl;dr: Take your time for finding the right employees for your software team, team's diversity is an huge advantage. Work with them in one office (in real life), it helps a lot.

Wikidata Project Timeline

- 2012: March WMDE started WD project
- 2013: April WMDE continued project after its completion
- 2014: WMDE decides to start a Software Engineering & Development department
Wikidata is a central data repository similar to Wikimedia Commons

Key Success Factors

hiring process
- Abraham found that it was necessary to have a team working in the same office, rather than collaborating remotely.
- it was important for the initial year to work near together
Constantly exchanging ideas and plans, and talking to other people was particularly important (at MediaWiki Hackathons, Google Hangouts, Wikimania) The constant exchange, telling other people, and getting feedback was important.
Expectation management: Lydia says she did not want to hype the project too much because there was much groundwork to do. They therefore kept the project's profile low in the beginning.
Development processes: Importance on build trust, much code review. Abraham says also, he did not engage in code war to create new tools

"Soft" Factors

- Split roles and responsibilities really well.
- Option of coming together in one place.
- Very high and active communication within the team

Key Challenges (first year)

- New Team & Environment: Built a team from scratch from different countries. Brought in different cultures and backgrounds from the IT industry together.
- Development methods & processes: Started from scratch, but you lose a lot of time because you have to introduce new methods, tools and processes. Also shared knowledge between new colleagues.
- Community Building around Wikidata

Key Success Factors (second year)

- worked very closely in collaboration processes with WMF. Set up constant and regular meetings every week.
- Asked for dedicated individuals within WMF who could field specific questions (operations, grants, legal, fundraising, communications, etc.)
- Well Functioning-Team:
- Well-established processes and working environment

Key Challenges (second year)

- Change of key positions
- Developing a team culture
- Project development v. product development
- Financial Planning
- Adoption of Wikidata on the large wikipedias.

Lessons learned

- code review takes a lot of time-
- Diversity on the team helps a lot
- Finding the right (tech) employees takes time
- different from tech start-ups in that they are working to create impact for culture and working in a FLOS environment

Take away: if you have a good idea, do it, be bold, and be brave!
Keep the global movement innovative, especially in the area of software development (this cannot happen if everything is centralized) FLOS deveopment is decentralized.

starting parallel projects in other places

Tips for starting parallel projects in other places (riffing off the idea that FLOS projects are decentralized)

identifying the need -> consider community input, don't look through the glasses of developers to identify goals and objectives
getting funding the project--but don't focus or count on just one source of funding. -> look for a party interested in the results of your project
have a plan of action of what you might do once the funding ends. Keep an eye on the infrastructure. -> start building a team in one place