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