Feature requirements for WMF's analytics infrastructure - Wiki-research-l

7 Jan 2011

Hi everyone,

I've only posted once before here, and didn't do much of an intro back
then, so let me do one now.  I'm the Program Manager for General
Engineering at Wikimedia Foundation, which is the slice of the WMF
Engineering organization that does infrastructure-related software
development.  One piece we're responsible for is the analytics
infrastructure.

We're in the process of planning our software development for
analytics for the coming months, so we've had a few conversations, and
Howie Fung and I spent some time planning and writing up our thoughts
on feature prioritization here:
http://strategy.wikimedia.org/wiki/Task_force/Analytics/Feature_prioritizat…

This is a really rough cut, and something we haven't fully discussed
within the Foundation, so don't take this as something that is coming
down from on high.  There are some things on the list that are well
underway, but many things are things we're just getting started on.

Barring any objections here, we'd like to use this mailing list as our
primary venue for discussing general prioritization of analytics
features.  We know we need a place that we can tell WMF employees to
subscribe if they're interested in this stuff, and nothing we're
discussing should be confidential.  Rather than starting a new mailing
list, we'd like to try using this list for a bit (in combination with
relevant talk pages on documents referenced here).  If it turns out
we're generating enough traffic to warrant splitting off or if this
list isn't working out for whatever reason, we'll figure out some
alternate plan.

While we suspect that many of the details will be of specific interest
to Foundation employees (who are relying on much of this information
to perform their jobs effectively), we also know there is plenty of
general interest in this work.  Please feel free to share your
thoughts.

Thanks!
Rob