Talk:Submissions/Transparency and collaboration in Wikimedia engineering

From Wikimania 2013 • Hong Kong

How you make a difference

Us: the Engineering Community Team, supporting you

15 minutes: What you can do to make a difference
10 minutes: Questions & answers

Examples of success

  • Mentor interns: Google Summer of Code - experienced Wikisource contributors, NOT technical, pair with technical mentors. Result: three GSoC interns this summer are improving Wikisource: Refactoring of Proofread Page extension, Improve support for book structures and Book upload customization for UploadWizard. (Quim)
  • Make fonts: Commissioned fonts for languages that didn't have them - enabled contribution by entire language communities (Sumana)
  • Find bugs: Mobile uploads for Commons testing week - the feedback from the Commons community and other mobile users helped the mobile team assessing the Commons apps and mobile web uploads, improving the priorities and deployment plans. (Quim)
    • Bug 49727: "Creating a new account broken". Brought up on IRC chat by Cyberpower678 who also quickly filed bug report. Sorted out within 40min with the help of Cyberpower678, Steven, Matthew, S, and Ori. (Andre)
    • Bug 48693: "Gadget settings cannot be changed after new MediaWiki version". Reported by Dmytro. MatmaRex confirmed, set highest priority, marked it as a blocker. Roan and Greg made sure to get a quick fix onto the servers. (Sumana)
  • Gather issues & prioritize them: Jack Phoenix moved admin tools forward. (Sumana)
  • Think about current problems: Skins bug report cleanup/triage has caused developers to understand what the problems were & what needed fixing sooner. (Andre)
  • Summarize news: Tech News weekly is written, translated and distributed by community volunteers. Gives other editors a heads-up about changes that will affect them. (Quim)

Needs better collaboration

  • Testing! Plain editors and plain Wikimedia readers are perfectly equipped to become great testers. Did you know automated browser testing starts with plain English descriptions anyone can edit? (Quim)
  • Bug report cleanup (triage): Ongoing activity that requires no specific technical knowledge (Andre)
  • Partnership with upstreams & other organizations, e.g., accessibility (Sumana)

To read for context

To help

Questions

Where do you get your Wikimedia tech news?

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