We’d like to notify our community about a few project updates and personnel
moves that will affect the Discovery team.
Earlier this year, the Discovery Department was split up into two main
teams - Search Platform that is under Technology and the Discovery team
that is under the Audiences:Readers umbrella. Now that the search frontend
UI/UX work has wrapped up and the
Wikipedia.org portal has been modernized,
we are consolidating as a team focusing on the Search backend. Our frontend
responsibilities are moving onto other teams with the Readers team. Here’s
a breakdown by project:
-
We are putting the final touches on the automation of statistics and
translations updates for the
Wikipedia.org portal page. This will enable
the stats and translations to be automatically updated on a weekly basis
with minimal involvement by humans. [1][2]
-
The Maps initiative will be moving to be a part of the Readers
Infrastructure team and we’re currently investigating a new open-sourced
backend map tile server replacement. [3]
-
We will be communicating soon about any impact this will have on
Discovery projects. [4]
-
The Search Platform team will continue enhancing and refining the
machine learning-to-rank backend functionality while expanding our language
support. [5]
Our frontend team members will be integrated into the rest of the
organization over the next few weeks:
-
Deb Tankersley will take on the Program Manager (Engineering) role in
Technology
-
Jan Drewniak will move to Readers Mobile Web
-
Paul Norman will move to Readers Infrastructure
-
Mikhail Popov and Chelsy Xie will remain in Readers and begin working on
new projects while assisting in a part-time basis with search analysis
Cheers,
The Discovery Team
[1]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T140159
[2]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia.org_Portal
[3]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps
[4]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery
[5]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/Search
--
deb tankersley
Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation