Re: [Wikitech-l] Community Tech: New Format for 2020 Wishlist Survey

[Yuri Astrakhan]

Ilana, restricting wishlist to non-Wikipedia this year is a very sad news.

For many years, wishlist survey was the best way for the community to talk
back to the foundation, and to try to influence its direction. WMF mostly
ignored these wishes, yet it was still a place to express, discuss,
aggregate and vote on what community needed. Big thank-you is due to the
tiny community tech team that tackled the top 10 items, but that's just ~3%
of the foundation's employees.

WMF has been steadily separating itself from the community and loosing
credibility as a guiding force.  Take a look at the last election -- almost
every candidate has said "no" to the question if WMF is capable of
deciding/delivering on the direction [1].  In **every** single conversation
I had with the community members, people expressed doubts with the movement
strategy project, in some cases even treating it as a joke.

This is a huge problem, and restricting wishlist kills the last effective
feedback mechanism community had.  Now WMF is fully in control of itself,
with nearly no checks & balances from the people who created it.

I still believe that if WMF makes it a priority to align most of its
quarterly/yearly goals with the community wishlist (not just top 10
positions), we could return to the effective community-governance.
Otherwise WMF is risking to mirror Red Cross Haiti story [2] -- hundreds of
millions of $$ donated, and very few buildings actually built.

With great respect to all the people who made Wikis what they are today,
--[[User:Yurik]]

[1]
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Affiliate-selected_Board_seats/2019/Questions#Do_you_believe_the_Wikimedia_Foundation_in_its_present_form_is_the_right_vehicle_for_the_delivery_of_the_strategic_direction?_If_so_why,_and_if_not,_what_might_replace_it?

[2]
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/American_Red_Cross#Disaster_preparedness_and_response

On Fri, Oct 4, 2019 at 5:18 PM Ilana Fried  wrote:

> Hello, everyone!
>
> My name is Ilana, and I'm the product manager for the Community Tech team.
> We’re excited to share an update on the Community Tech 2020 Wishlist Survey
> . This
> will
> be our fifth annual Community Wishlist Survey, and for this year, we’ve
> decided to take a different approach. In the past, we've invited people to
> write proposals for any features or fixes that they'd like to see, and the
> Community Tech team has addressed the top ten wishes with the most support
> votes. This year, we're just going to focus on the *non-Wikipedia content
> projects* (i.e. Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Commons, Wikisource,
> Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews), and we're
> only going to address the top five wishes from this survey. This is a big
> departure from the typical process. In the following year (2021), we’ll
> probably return to the traditional structure.
>
> So, why this change? We’ve been following the same format for years — and,
> generally, it has lots of benefits. We build great tools, provide useful
> improvements, and have an impact on diverse communities. However, the
> nature of the format tends to prioritize the largest project (Wikipedia).
> This makes it harder to serve smaller projects, and many of their wishes
> never make it onto the wishlist. As a community-focused team, we want to
> support *all* projects. Thus, for 2020, we want to shine a light on
> non-Wikipedia projects.
>
> Furthermore, we’ll be accepting five wishes. Over the years, we’ve taken on
> larger wishes (like Global Preferences
>  or Who
> Wrote That
> ),
> which are awesome projects. At the same time, they tend to be lengthy
> endeavors, requiring extra time for research and development. When we
> looked at the 2019 wishlist, there were still many unresolved wishes.
> Meanwhile, we wanted to make room for the new 2020 wishes. For this reason,
> we’ve decided to take on a shortened list, so we can address as many wishes
> (new and remaining 2019 wishes
> )
> as possible.
>
> Overall, we look forward to this year’s survey. We worked with lots of
> folks (engineering, product management, and others) to think about how we
> could support underserved projects, all while preserving the dynamic and
> open nature of the wishlist. *Please let us know your thoughts
> *
> related
> to this change. In addition, we’ll begin thinking about the guidelines for
> this new process, so *we want your feedback
> * (on
> what sorts of processes/rules we may want to consider). Thank you, and
> we’re very curious to see the wishes in November!
>
>
> Thanks,
>
> Ilana Fried
>
> Product 

[Wikitech-l] Community Tech: New Format for 2020 Wishlist Survey

[Ilana Fried]

Hello, everyone!

My name is Ilana, and I'm the product manager for the Community Tech team.
We’re excited to share an update on the Community Tech 2020 Wishlist Survey
. This will
be our fifth annual Community Wishlist Survey, and for this year, we’ve
decided to take a different approach. In the past, we've invited people to
write proposals for any features or fixes that they'd like to see, and the
Community Tech team has addressed the top ten wishes with the most support
votes. This year, we're just going to focus on the *non-Wikipedia content
projects* (i.e. Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Wikiquote, Commons, Wikisource,
Wikiversity, Wikispecies, Wikidata, Wikivoyage, and Wikinews), and we're
only going to address the top five wishes from this survey. This is a big
departure from the typical process. In the following year (2021), we’ll
probably return to the traditional structure.

So, why this change? We’ve been following the same format for years — and,
generally, it has lots of benefits. We build great tools, provide useful
improvements, and have an impact on diverse communities. However, the
nature of the format tends to prioritize the largest project (Wikipedia).
This makes it harder to serve smaller projects, and many of their wishes
never make it onto the wishlist. As a community-focused team, we want to
support *all* projects. Thus, for 2020, we want to shine a light on
non-Wikipedia projects.

Furthermore, we’ll be accepting five wishes. Over the years, we’ve taken on
larger wishes (like Global Preferences
 or Who
Wrote That
),
which are awesome projects. At the same time, they tend to be lengthy
endeavors, requiring extra time for research and development. When we
looked at the 2019 wishlist, there were still many unresolved wishes.
Meanwhile, we wanted to make room for the new 2020 wishes. For this reason,
we’ve decided to take on a shortened list, so we can address as many wishes
(new and remaining 2019 wishes
)
as possible.

Overall, we look forward to this year’s survey. We worked with lots of
folks (engineering, product management, and others) to think about how we
could support underserved projects, all while preserving the dynamic and
open nature of the wishlist. *Please let us know your thoughts
* related
to this change. In addition, we’ll begin thinking about the guidelines for
this new process, so *we want your feedback
* (on
what sorts of processes/rules we may want to consider). Thank you, and
we’re very curious to see the wishes in November!


Thanks,

Ilana Fried

Product Manager, Community Tech

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[Wikitech-l] Wikimedia Technical Conference 2019: Open commenting period around themes and sessions

[Rachel Farrand]

Hello!

We are holding a week long public commenting period (ending 11 October) on
the proposals for themes and sessions for the Wikimedia Technical
Conference 2019
which
will be taking place in Atlanta, Georgia USA this November and will
centered around Developer Productivity.
Everyone is welcome to review the plan proposal created by our Program
Committee

and provide feedback and suggestions.

All proposals can be found here: https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T234085

Thank you!
-- 
Rachel Farrand
Senior Program Manager
Events Team
Wikimedia Foundation
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[Wikitech-l] Dropping PHPUnit 4 support

[Daimona]

Hello all,
Following our migration away from HHVM, we're now also requiring PHPUnit 6+
[0]. Previously, we were allowing PHPUnit 4 as an option, but that version
was EOLed in February 2017 [1].

MediaWiki core provides a backward/forward-compatible layer [2] to allow
working with both versions. However, that trait will be emptied and removed
soon, partly because we want to move to PHPUnit 8.

Hence, if you have a local install of PHPUnit 4, you won't be able to use
it anymore. I also invite you to check whether any of your repos has an
explicit PHPUnit dependency in composer.json [3]. If it does, you can now
remove PHPUnit 4 from it.

Thank you for your collaboration!

[0] - https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/mediawiki/core/+/426058/
[1] - https://phpunit.de/supported-versions.html
[2] -
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/g/mediawiki/core/+/e26299b1d14feb341ff5752696f8a24045df9838/tests/phpunit/PHPUnit4And6Compat.php
[3] - List of repos that do have it:
https://codesearch.wmflabs.org/search/?q=%22phpunit%5C%2Fphpunit%22%3A=nope=%5Ecomposer%5C.json%24=

-- 
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Daimona_Eaytoy
"Daimona" is not my real name -- he/him
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