Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2017-2018/Draft/Programs/Product/da
About Product
This year’s Product annual plan builds on the initiatives of the past year with a focus on getting better, learning more about our users, and building on our existing experiences. Our focus is not on grand initiatives, but deep and meaningful improvements in our focus and methods, preparing ourselves to fully support the movement strategy when it is unveiled later in the year. Nonetheless, there are some exciting developments in the works for all of our stakeholders.
We’ll augment the community wishlist with resources focused on programs. We’ll deep dive into supporting smaller editor communities and New Readers. We’ll address platform shifts in editing. We’ll continue to improve our reading experiences to make them richer and more accessible. Finding things on-wiki will be easier and faster, and will have better support. Fundraising tech will continue to support our donors.
The Product team has always been organized around audiences — traditionally Editors, Readers, Discovery, Community Tech and Donors. This year we will enhance this focus, based on more refined and systematic definitions of our audiences as shown in the audience map below. Our initiatives will balance sustaining existing communities with targeted developments focused on new audiences, platforms and technologies.
Our initiatives will be guided not only by deep engagement with our users but by deliberate and thoughtful support of our employees. The Team Practices Group will lead this effort by providing day-to-day support of our teams as well as taking on larger organizational issues. We will also continue to infuse our processes and initiatives with design, and support a greater footprint for this function across the organization.
As we mature, we are moving towards a focus on impact (as opposed to products or technology) using a Program format for our framing. This approach, which was fine-tuned by the New Readers team this year, helps us think outside the "product" — and allows us to work more effectively with additional stakeholders in the Foundation and the Community in support of clear, actionable outcomes. Note that the Product organization is contributing significantly to the cross-org programs detailed in another section, and here we discuss “product department only” programs.
We are deeply moved and inspired by our place in the movement. We believe that a mutual understanding and increasing collaboration with the community will accelerate our common progress towards the sum of all knowledge. It’s an honor to be a part of the movement, and we look forward to 2017–18 with a renewed sense of purpose and hope.
Program 1: Make knowledge more easily discoverable
Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects have a wealth of knowledge and content that is not easily discoverable by our readers. Discovery’s mission is to make that knowledge more easily discoverable, on all interfaces, to aid in organic growth. Our primary products are Search (includes search querying, geo search, search result recommendations, etc.), Wikidata Query Service, the Wikipedia.org portal, and interactive Maps.
Discovery also maintains the Elasticsearch infrastructure that is used for critical functions such as Logstash and backend search on Phabricator.
Goal 1
Maintain our search systems and improve the relevance of search results.
Strategic priorities: Reach and Knowledge
Team: Discovery with Community Liaisons, Wikimedia Deutschland
Timeframe: Ongoing
Outcome, Objectives, and Milestones
Outcome 1: Through incremental Discovery improvements, readers are better able to discover and search for content.
- Objective 1: Implement advanced methodologies such as “learning to rank” machine learning techniques and signals to improve search result relevance across language Wikipedias.
- Objective 2: Improve support for multiple languages by researching and deploying new language analyzers as they make sense to individual language wikis.
- Objective 3: Maintain and expand on power-user search functionality to help with editor workflows.
- Milestone 1: Enable more accurate search results based on a combination of methods, signals, and analyzers that we can create within CirrusSearch. The decrease of zero results rate (see also here) will be a good indicator, as well as a corresponding increase in user satisfaction rate.
- Milestone 2: Provide more in-depth power user ability within the site and API.
=== Goal 2 === The user experience of search on desktop is old and may significantly impede the ability of users to find content quickly and easily. To combat that, we will improve the user interface of search on desktop to help users find what they’re looking for.
Team: Discovery with Community Liaisons, Wikimedia Deutschland (Objective 2.4)
Strategic priorities: Reach and Knowledge
Timeframe: 9 - 12 months; Outcome 2/Objective 2.4 might take longer than 12 months
=== Outcome, Objectives, and Milestone === Outcome 1: Through improvements to the user experience of search interfaces, users are better able to find content in an intuitive and easy way.
- Objective 1: Experiment with improvements to user interface of completion-suggester box on the desktop version
- Objective 2: Improve user interface of search results page to help users explore content and discover more content across the projects
- Objective 3: Experiment with wikipedia.org to improve its ability to serve as a landing page for finding content in Wikimedia sites, such as trending articles
- Objective 4: Investigate how to expand and scale Wikidata Query Service to improve its ability to power features on-wiki for readers
- Milestone 1: Analysis of data collected in A/B tests and user research will show that the visual improvements are intuitive and easy to use
Goal 3
As part of the Discovery team, maps can help visitors to discover new, interesting, and relevant information within the Wikimedia projects.
Strategic priorities: Reach
Team: Discovery with Community Liaisons
Timeframe: 12 months
Outcome and objective
Outcome 1: Ensure that the current map functionality is rolled out and supported across the projects.
- Objective 1: We are currently investigating various options in supporting the maps project and are sizing our commitments accordingly. At minimum, we will support existing functionality as well as security and operations.
Program 2: Better Encyclopedia
Team: Product: Reading
- Dependencies: Technology > Analytics, Technology > Services, CE > CL
- (standard reviews: security, legal, privacy, operations, performance)
Strategic priorities: Reach
Timeframe: This program is ongoing, but includes maintenance and creation. The foundation needs to invest in the opportunities afforded by modern technology and usage patterns, and bring the Wikipedia experience in line with the expectations of today’s users.
Summary
Wikipedia is one of the top-10 Internet destinations worldwide, with one billion devices visiting Wikipedia every month. We provide an important function to hundreds of millions of people throughout the world. However, learning on the site, as approximated by pageviews and number of devices*, appears relatively flat, despite continued growth in Internet usage.
This program is about celebrating Wikipedia’s strengths and leveraging them further. It is about applying technological and design improvements to make it the best encyclopedia possible for our readers.
*We also recognize that the current metric of pageviews and unique devices are not ideal proxies for learning. We believe that time spent and return frequency will add color to our understanding, but consumption is not the ultimate goal: we hope to one day measure our human impact.
Goal
Increase the amount of learning that happens on Wikipedia, which we will approximate through pageviews, unique devices (a proxy for users), how often users return, time spent on the site, and other ways.
Through a combination of user research, community discussion, design and product development we hope to make Wikipedia a more rewarding experience for our users, which we believe will allow people to learn more.
Outcomes, Objectives, and Milestones
Outcome 1: Users have better experiences when interacting with articles across mobile and desktop Web platforms, measured through a combination of metrics focused on user retention, pageviews, and time spent on page (Audience H)
- Objective 1: Enable readers to gauge the quality and reliability of an article prior to reading
- Milestone 1: Distinguish visually between pages with significant issues and pages that have less significant issues or have none at all
- Objective 2: Build on existing work creating better metrics to generate a more nuanced measure of learning
- Milestone 1: Begin including at least 1 new KPI relating to knowledge consumption in our reading reports
- Objective 3: Increase learning for all users by providing articles that load quickly in various settings
- Milestone 1: Integrate at least two new services for article rendering on mobile web
- Objective 4: Provide a smoother reading experience by improving the ways that users can flag articles of interest for later consumption
- Milestone 1: Improve rendering functionality for PDF creation and book tool
- Milestone 2: Publish a plan for providing the ability to save pages across all platforms by assessing current functionality for flagging articles for later reading
- Objective 5: Improve the end-user reading experience by applying a cohesive design language across multiple screen sizes
- Milestone 1: Through qualitative testing, evaluate the effect of increased responsiveness of the mobile website for larger screens
Outcome 2: High-affinity readers (audience G) benefit more from engaging with our sites, and are better aware of Wikimedia's apps.
- Objective 1: Iterate and improve new app features that drive reuse and learning by high-affinity readers
- Milestone 1: Develop and deploy a push notifications service for more direct app messaging to users. Deliver at least one type recurring/regular notification for each app platform. Beta test notifications for mobile and/or desktop web.
- Objective 2: Run a targeted awareness campaign on wiki based on specific feature use or behavioral indicators that apps can optimize for (iOS)
- Milestone 1: Raise awareness of the apps and their specific user value as measured by install volumes
- Objective 3: Continue to improve accessibility of the apps
- Objective 4: Increase engagement and retention by pushing content to users based on relevance, timeliness, interest, and/or preferences (RI/iOS/Android)
- Milestone 1: Convert existing “pull” app notifications to use “push” notification infrastructure
- Milestone 2: Maintaining core metrics and positive user feedback and reviews while broadening user base
Program 3: Increase device support for editing
Teams:
- Product > Editing
- Editing engineering teams
- Editing Design team
- Editing Product team
- Community Engagement
- Community Liaisons team
- Teknologi
- MediaWiki team
- Design Research team
Strategic priorities: Reach, Communities
Summary
With Internet access and mobile device usage rapidly growing, many people in our emerging communities access the Internet exclusively using mobile devices. With so many new users coming online, the steep learning curve involved in contributing to our projects leads to high reversion rates early on. We will extend the long-form editing experience so that it is great on all devices as well as investigate other contribution tasks that are appropriate for mobile devices.
Goal
Support content contribution on mobile devices
Outcome
- Outcome 1: In emerging communities, engagement and number of participants increases, and the proportion of mobile contributions continues its strong growth.
Objectives
- Objective 1: Improve and consolidate our unified editing platform so that it's great on all devices [Audience B1]
- Objective 2: Invest in our future by researching a radically better multi-lingual content system (both reading and editing), compatible across all devices [Audiences B4, G, H, I]
- Objective 3: Collaborate with Reading to create new mechanisms by which to contribute edits with lower context or in small ways on mobile devices [Audiences B1, G]
- Objective 4: Maintain editing technologies with very high up-time for all our users. Reduce product and technical debt to modernise our tools and technologies, and to make future changes more effective and efficient [Audience B]
- Objective 5: Modernise user interface technologies to encompass mobile and desktop platforms, with continued work on the Wikimedia-wide adoption of a standard Web user interface library [Audiences B, G, I, J]
- Objective 6: Support work towards unifying MediaWiki's parser implementations, in liaison with Technology's MediaWiki team [Audience J]
Milestones/Targets
- Target 1: The proportion of mobile edits of all non-bot edits grows significantly across all Wikimedia wikis
- Target 2: The proportion of mobile editors of all non-bot editors in emerging communities grows significantly
- Target 3: The breadth and depth of content in emerging communities grows significantly
- Target 4: The quantity of mobile contributions of a specific contribution type on a specific wiki with community approval increases
- Target 5: We determine the future direction of Wikidata description editing, based on the initial launch, outcomes, and community feedback
Program 4: New editor success
Teams:
- Product > Editing
- Editing engineering teams
- Editing Design team
- Editing Product team
- Community Engagement
- Community Liaisons team
- Teknologi
- Design Research
Strategic priorities: Reach, Communities, Knowledge
Timeframe: Ongoing; 12 months for this portion
Summary
A steady inflow of good-faith new editors, and the tools and resources to shape them into productive community members, is crucial to the long-term sustainability and diversity of Wikimedia projects. However, the number of new editors across Wikimedia projects has declined over the past several years even as the number of existing editors has remained stable. Compared to the experiences and perspectives of existing editors, relatively little is known about the experiences and perspectives of new editors. This lack of understanding is particularly acute outside the largest communities (such as English and German Wikipedias). Tenured users spend much of their time reviewing these incoming edits, many of which are unacceptable because of the simple mistakes new users commonly make.
We will work to improve the experience of our emerging communities, on mid-sized Wikimedia wikis with roughly 500–2,000 monthly active contributors, where we think we can provide the most benefit.
Goal
Improve the new editor experience
Outcome
- Outcome 1: In emerging communities, increase the retention of new editors, and the quality of their contributions.
Objectives
- Objective 1: Expand and deepen our understanding of the experiences of new editors in emerging communities based on generative research [Audience B1]
- Objective 2: Improve, adjust, or create features geared at the needs identified in the research project. The features will be chosen based on research outcomes, but likely will be aimed at the following:
- Providing better contextual guidance to new users facing social or technical obstacles during the editing process (such as a perceived lack of permission to edit, a lack of understanding of citations and linking, or a desire for real-time assistance) [Audiences B1, B2, B7]
- Better supporting existing editors in mentoring and nurturing new users (such as by improving communications, helping identify good-faith newcomers, or helping new users express their interests and needs) [Audiences B1, B2, B7]
Milestones/Targets
- Target 1: In emerging communities, the second-month retention rate of new accounts increases
- Target 2: In emerging communities, the revert rate for edits by new accounts and IPs decreases
Program 5: Increase current editor retention and engagement
Teams:
- Product > Editing
- Editing engineering teams
- Editing Design team
- Editing Product team
- Community Engagement
- Community Liaisons team
- Technology
- Research & Data
- Design Research
- ORES Team
Strategic priorities: Reach, Communities
Timeframe: Ongoing; 12 months for this portion
Summary
We are seeking to understand and address our larger wikis communities’ extensive backlogs of work, and provide better monitoring, workflow and communication experiences. Identifying ideal contribution tasks is complex and slow, and monitoring changes has similar issues. Recommending specific contributions for users to make has been shown to increase engagement, when trialled with Content Translation. Some community-developed tools show demand for tasks, like FixMeBot from Labs, and on-wiki portals like the English Wikipedia's backlog page. This lack of support is particularly a key growth inhibitor on established communities (those with more than 2,000 monthly active contributors).
Goal 1
Recommend where new and tenured users can contribute
Outcome
- Outcome 1: We understand and begin addressing the issues our larger wikis' communities are facing with extensive backlogs of work
Objectives
- Objective 1: Develop a deeper understanding of how communities share, surface, and select contribution tasks on their wikis by researching community-built systems, especially focused on larger wikis [Audiences B1, B2, B7]
- Objective 2: Improve, adjust, or create features geared at the needs identified in our research. The features will be decided upon based on the findings, but will likely be aimed at the following:
- Supporting users by surfacing recommendations with community-wide contribution tasks, such as in a dashboard [Audiences B1, B2]
- Provide users with recommendations for contribution tasks personalised to their activity and interests [Audiences B1, B2]
Milestones/Targets
- Target 1: In established communities, the contribution rate of tenured editors increases
- Target 2: In established communities, the rate of increase in backlogs slows
Goal 2
Give better ways to monitor contributions
Outcome
- Outcome 1: Reviewing contributions is more accessible, efficient, and productive.
Objectives
- Objective 1: Apply the new recent changes filters technology with Machine Learning to other contexts like watchlists and history pages [Audiences B2, B7]
- Objective 2: Improve the productivity of tenured editors through fixing long-standing issues with change-monitoring tools, in collaboration with Community Tech [Audiences B1, B2, B7]
Milestone/Target
- Target 1: In established communities, increase the number of people involved in edit review
Goal 3
Provide better workflow and communication experiences
Outcome
- Outcome 1: We understand and begin addressing the issues our communities are facing with their processes to collaborate on content and conduct concerns ("workflows") whilst better supporting existing users of structured discussions
Objectives
- Objective 1: Evaluate initial opportunities for improving common workflows, consolidating and updating all the existing research on on-wiki behaviors [Audiences B1, B2, B7]
- Objective 2: Improve structured discussion features for the communities that use them, based on user feedback and prioritising technical debt [Audiences B1, B7]
Milestones/Targets
- Target 1: We have at least one proposal for experimenting with supporting a common workflow
- Target 2: Search in structured discussions is completed on or before 31 March 2018
Program 6: Community Wishlist
Team: Community Tech
Strategic priorities: This program benefits the core contributors in our volunteer communities, making their work on the projects easier and more productive. This supports increased production, curation and moderation of Wikimedia projects as sources of knowledge.
Timeframe: 12 months
Summary
The most active contributors on Wikimedia are the primary creators and caretakers of our projects. As volunteers, contributors have built tools and workflows based on templates, bots and gadgets, with limited support from the Foundation.
Sometimes, these volunteer tools break, and the volunteers who created them don’t have time to fix them. Workflows based on templates and categories add unnecessary burdens on volunteers’ time and patience. Limitations in the MediaWiki software can also prevent volunteers from being as efficient and productive as they want to be.
Goal
The Community Tech team works on features and fixes that support Wikimedia’s most active contributors. The core work of the team is determined by the top 10 wishes identified and prioritized in the annual Community Wishlist Survey. The team also spends time working on prioritized wishes from smaller groups of contributors, and from WMF Community Engagement.
Outcome
- Outcome 1: Improved productivity and satisfaction for very active contributors
Objectives
- Objective 1: In 2017, the team is responsible for investigating and addressing the top 10 wishes from the 2016 survey, including: Global settings, Wikitext editor syntax highlighting, Warning on unsuccessful login attempts, Rewrite of Xtools.
- Objective 2: Build features to benefit groups of users that work with WMF Community Engagement, including admins, stewards and grantees, as well as internal tools as prioritized by Community Engagement
Milestone/Target
- Target 1: During calendar year 2017, the top 10 wishes identified on the 2016 Community Wishlist Survey will be addressed. For any wishes that aren’t completed, the team will provide an explanation of the investigation and any decisions. (In 2016, 5 of the 10 wishes were completed, with a sixth wish still in progress.) The team will also address several wishes that benefit smaller groups of contributors, and several from Community Engagement’s priority list.
Program 7: Payment processor investigation and long-term strategy
Teams: Advancement Management and all of Fundraising-tech
Strategic priorities: This is the cornerstone of almost all fundraising activities and supersedes strategic priorities.
Timeframe: Q1 and part of Q2 will involve market research, technical investigations, and negotiations with Payment Service Providers.
Summary
Currently 50% of all work is planned maintenance or new integrations of payment systems. We have steadily increased the number of payment processor relationships. We have also steadily increased the number of countries where we run campaigns (19% growth last year).
This is the cornerstone of almost all fundraising activities and supersedes strategic priorities. With the current high complexity, there are a number of ways to adjust our work and consider alternatives.
Goal
Evaluate several options through Q1 and Q2. We plan to choose our mix of options by the end of Q2 and begin executing on them in Q3.
The following options are not a complete list and could happen in parallel:
- Support of the SmashPig donations payment initiative
- Fewer processors that offer more payment options (lower maintenance but higher fees)
- Changes to countries and payment options with low ROI.
- Remain at current functionality with no planned expansion
Outcome
- Outcome 1: Advancement and fr-tech find a solution that lowers or does not increase current maintenance costs.
Objectives
- Objective 1: In Q1 and Q2 we will be running down our list of options and investigating them. We have priority meetings every 2 weeks to review progress.
- Also during Q1 and Q2 we will be investigating retention features in between investigations of PsPs. We hope to repair some obvious bugs, testing and stats systems
- Objective 2: In Q3 and Q4 we will be executing on the chosen plan
Milestones/Targets
- Milestone 1: End of Q2: Choose a mix of options
- Milestone 2: End of Q3: Demonstrate the start of the new direction and plan as needed
Program 8: Donor retention
Teams: Advancement Management and all of Fundraising-tech
Strategic priorities: This is a reach and communities project. With more accurate donor histories, we can learn more about and communicate better with our communities.
Timeframe: 6 Months<
Summary
Advancement stores critical donor data in our own installation of CiviCRM. Our instance has many duplicate records in its database. We have developed a method for combining (deduping) records from the same donor. Previously, this had only been done by hand. Our current system did not have a measurable impact on the manual process in our largest campaigns in December. We hope to devote more time to the optimization and expansion of this system this year.
Goal
Bring dedupe to a volume and quality level that can produce a measurable benefit for Wikimedia’s Foundations and Major Gifts team during the English Campaign.
Outcome
- Outcome 1: In FY 16/17 four well-trained team members spent 106 hours on deduping related to the English campaign. One of those employees may not be available for this task next year and a new contractor may help. We still hope to reduce the hours spent. We will need to track hours next year and assess impact.
Objective
- Objective 1: We currently have ~30 merge conflicts that are slated to be fixed and merged correctly. This counts as our first phase of work.
Milestones/Targets
- Milestone 1: Resolution of the first list of conflicts.
- Milestone 2: Code freeze for the Big English in late October.
Program 9: Team practices and organizational development
Team: Team Practices Group
Strategic priorities: Reach, Communities, Knowledge
Timeframe: 12 months
Summary
The Team Practices Group (TPG) is collaboratively building a culture and organization that is well-equipped to focus on problem-solving, effective collaboration, and learning. We support and champion the foundational skills, mindsets, and practices that underlie resilient, healthy, and adaptable teams and organizations. The TPG accomplishes its mission through day-to-day agile coaching and scrum mastering with the Foundation's Product teams. Demand for TPG’s services is higher than ever, and comes from across the entire organization. As a centralized team, TPG brings a useful degree of neutrality and objectivity to working with teams, adding value to the projects by bringing in domain knowledge grounded in context, but without core responsibility for the outputs.
Goal
By providing Wikimedia Foundation teams and individuals the support and training to define and solve their own problems, the Team Practices Group improves the organization’s capacity to cope with problems, adapt to change, and leverage opportunities.
Key to this approach is cultivating a safe climate for learning and change.
Through an organizational development and team-practices lens, we take a values-based approach to supporting individuals, teams, and the organization to reach the organization’s highest potential. The TPG accomplishes its mission through day-to-day agile coaching and scrum mastering with the Foundation's Product teams. Over the last year, the TPG experimented with expanding the scope of its operations by creating an “Agile Coach: Organizational Collaboration” role which is focussed on identifying and addressing bottlenecks in order to improve collaboration across all levels of the organization. Work in this domain is proposed to continue in FY 17-18. Demand for TPG’s services is higher than ever, and comes from across the entire organization. As a centralized team, TPG brings a useful degree of neutrality and objectivity to working with teams, adding value to the projects by bringing in domain knowledge grounded in context, but without core responsibility for the outputs.
Team Practices
Outcomes
- Outcome 1: The Team Practices Group positively impacts and supports team health.
- Outcome 2: Work with teams to promote a culture of trust and collaboration and improve ongoing team operations on a continuous basis.
- Outcome 3: Through coaching and process support, create conditions for self-organization that build capacity for problem solving, autonomous decision-making, and learning.
Objectives
- Objective 1: Support and facilitate processes across the Foundation that encourage learning, feedback, excellence, and value delivery — leading to:
- Iteration
- Retrospectives / inspecting adapting
- Working transparently and visualizing workflows
- Other Lean practices
- Conditions for increased self-organization, autonomy, and decision-making
Milestones/Targets
- Milestone 1: We will track specific engagements by one or more of the following mechanisms:
- Quarterly (or other interval) team objectives (set with teams) and check-ins
- TPG Customer Satisfaction survey
- Agile Coaching Life Cycle tracking
- TPG Light Engagement Survey
Organizational Development
Outcomes
- Outcome 1: Improve the organization’s capacity to cope with problems, adapt to change, and leverage opportunities.
- Outcome 2:Increased ability to define and solve their organizational problems.
Objectives
- Objective 1: Provide support and training across Wikimedia Foundation teams and groups to build skills and define and solve their own problems. Activities may include:
- Organizational learning (retrospectives)
- Facilitated workshops and events that build organizational capacity and collective ownership (e.g., Collab Jam)
- Supporting organizational values in practice
- Supporting organizational leadership framework in practice
- Collaboratively-defined interventions TBD
Milestones/Targets
- Milestone 1: Summary/lessons learned
Program 10: Wikidata
Team: Wikidata (WMDE)
Strategic priorities: Knowledge
Timeframe: Work covers 12 months
Summary
Wikidata’s first and foremost function is to provide a structured data backbone for the Wikimedia projects. The Wikidata team will focus on two goals in this fiscal year: improving and building out Wikidata; and increasing its reach into the other Wikimedia projects. The primary targets here are Wiktionary, Wikimedia Commons, and Wikipedia.
Goal
Continued support for funding and development of Wikidata
Outcomes, Objectives, and Milestones
Outcome 1: Continue to assure the technical and social sustainability of Wikidata (software and community) as the central, structured knowledge data base for the Wikimedia movement and beyond. This will help users detect and fix data quality issues more easily, help institutions contribute in a productive way to Wikidata and are part of the community, and help more users write queries.
- Objective 1: Improved constraint reports and related data quality tools: The amount of data in Wikidata is growing. We need to build out existing quality tools like the constraint reports and investigate which other tools will help the editors keep the data quality in Wikidata high without burning them out.
- Objective 2: Make it easier to query Wikidata's data with specialized tools and UI improvements: The Wikidata Query Service is an incredibly powerful tool, but t is still hard for the majority of users to use it. A big hurdle is knowledge of SPARQL as a query language. We will experiment with ways to make it easier for people who are not familiar with SPARQL to adapt existing queries and create their own.
- Milestone 1: Users can detect and fix data quality issues more easily
- Milestone 2: More users write queries
Outcome 2: Continue to increase the reach of Wikidata into the Wikimedia projects. We aim to significantly increase the instances of data uses from Wikidata by Wikimedia projects. We will achieve this by removing barriers for editors on Wikipedia and enabling new kinds of data to be collected within Wikidata and Wikimedia Commons — thereby making Wikidata more useful to the other projects.
- Objective 1: Enable automated list generation: A lot of work on Wikipedia is spent on maintaining list articles. This is magnified by the fact that each language edition of Wikipedia maintains its lists independently from the other Wikipedias. With the help of Wikidata we will make it possible for people to create list articles that are automatically updated based on data in Wikidata. This is aimed to especially help small Wikipedias keep lists (like the list of a country’s presidents) updated more easily.
- Objective 2: Enable editing of Wikidata's data from Wikipedia via VisualEditor: Editors on Wikipedia care deeply about enabling anyone to edit. With the usage of data from Wikipedia, changes to this data also need to be made on Wikidata, to lower the barrier to participation. We will redesign the input widgets on Wikidata and make them more modular. We will then integrate them into VisualEditor to allow editors to change data from Wikidata right on their Wikipedia when editing an article.
- Objective 3: Make it possible to store lexicographical data (Wiktionary support): Lexicographical data can so far not be stored on Wikidata. We will build out the support for lexicographical data in order to support Wiktionary and make this additional type of data available as structured data. This requires new entity types and specialized user-interface pieces for lexicographical data.
- Objective 4: Supporting structured data for multimedia files (Wikimedia Commons support): Wikimedia Commons holds a large amount of images. The lack of structured data for the meta data like license, creator, location and more causes a number of significant issues for discoverability, management and re-use of our multimedia content. We will work on one of the big ground-work projects: Multi-Content-Revisions. With this feature, we will make it possible to store both wikitext and structured data in the same page. This will require significant changes to the core of MediaWiki.
- Milestone 1: Users can create automated lists based on Wikidata
- Milestone 2: Users edit Wikidata directly from sister projects
- Milestone 3: First lexicographical data is stored in Wikidata and people query lexicographical data, build tools, etc.