Hi!
I'd like to welcome you to join us at the CREDIT showcase next week,
Wednesday, 5-April-2017 at 1800 UTC / 1100 Pacific Time. We'd like to see
your demos, whether they're rough works in progress or polished production
material, or even just a telling of something you've been studying
recently. For more information on the upcoming event, as well as recordings
of previous events, please visit the following page:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/CREDIT_showcase
And if you'd like to share the news about the upcoming CREDIT showcase,
here's some suggested verbiage. Thanks!
*Hi <FNAME>*
*I hope all is well with you! I wanted to let you know about CREDIT, a
monthly demo series that we’re running to showcase open source tech
projects from Wikimedia’s Community, Reading, Editing, Discovery,
Infrastructure and Technology teams. *
*CREDIT is open to the public, and we welcome questions and discussion. The
next CREDIT will be held on April 5th at 11am PT / 2pm ET / 18:00 UTC. *
*There’s more info on MediaWiki, and on Etherpad, which is where we take
notes and ask questions. You can also ask questions on IRC in the Freenode
chatroom #wikimedia-office (web-based access here). Links to video will
become available at these locations shortly before the event.*
*Please feel free to pass this information along to any interested folks.
Our projects tend to focus on areas that might be of interest to folks
working across the open source tech community: language detection,
numerical sort, large data visualizations, maps, and all sorts of other
things.*
*If you have any questions, please let me know! Thanks, and I hope to see
you at CREDIT.*
*YOURNAME*
Dear Katherine,
I hope this email finds you well.
As resolved from the recent Wiki Indaba 2017 in Accra, Ghana please find
attached the L2K.[1]
This letter consists of the feedback collected from participants on two
sets of questions (explained further in the letter). The organizers of
Indaba analysed this data on behalf of the African conference participants.
We would also like to take the opportunity to appreciate Wikimedia
Foundation support including Asaf Bartov and Kacie Harold from Community
Engagement, Jack Rabah from the Global Reach Team, and Zack McCune from the
Communications Team.
See you soon at our next Wiki Indaba in Tunisia.
Best,
- Felix Nartey
[1] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WikiIndaba_conference_
2017/Letter_to_Katherine_(L2K)
Hello everyone,
I am pleased to share with you the news about the formation of the latest
team in the Technology department, the MediaWiki Platform team![1]
The MediaWiki Platform team will be tasked with leading maintenance and
improvements related to the core MediaWiki platform codebase. That includes
encouraging future development of the MediaWiki platform and addressing the
technical debt that has accumulated during the 15-year history of MediaWiki.
MediaWiki is an amazing, powerful, and complex open-source software
platform. The number and variety of extensions, and the wide variety of
communities who have adopted MediaWiki as their method for knowledge
collection and dissemination, are a testament to its strength as a software
platform.
Like any significant codebase with a long development history, there are
remnants of design choices and experiments that are no longer in use, and
some areas of code are in need of modernization. However, at its core is a
large amount of highly functional, secure, performant code, capable of
supporting a robust platform through the use of extensions and hooks. There
is also a great amount of flexibility to adapt to new requirements.
This team will have a more focused purpose than the previous MediaWiki Core
team.[2]. While the previous team was at times spread too thin, many areas
are now covered by dedicated teams like Security and Performance. The new
MediaWiki Platform team will center their efforts on the core codebase. The
team will also have a dedicated Product Manager who will be creating the
platform roadmap in collaboration with the team, the Architecture Committee
and the MediaWiki user community.
Specific goals for this team are to:
* Assist and encourage development of features for MediaWiki by providing
developers with a strong core.
* Undertake feature development work which is primarily architectural in
nature.
* Facilitate the development and publication of MediaWiki's roadmap to
assist coordination between internal and external users.
* Maintain and promote guidelines and standards for the MediaWiki core.
I am thrilled that Tim Starling has agreed to lead the team, reporting
directly to me. He will be joined by Brion Vibber, Kunal Mehta and Brad
Jorsch. The team officially launches on Monday April 3, and will complete
the hiring and onboarding of additional team members in the coming months.
Their initial workplan will include core support for multi content
revisions for the Structured Data on Commons project and will be discussed
in more detail during the upcoming consultation for the Wikimedia
Foundation 2017-2018 annual plan.
I am excited by this latest evolution in the structure of the Foundation's
Engineering group. We will continue to learn from our collective knowledge
and expertise, and make adjustments to our composition and plans. I
appreciate the input provided by many in the community that helped inform
this decision. I also want to thank the members of the Wikimedia
Foundation's Product, Technology, and Community Engagement departments who
were involved in this process. In particular, I would like to thank Toby
Negrin, Adam Baso, and Trevor Parscal - whose support was critical in
bringing this plan together.
Join me in welcoming and celebrating our new team!
Victoria