Dear Gnangarra and everyone who feels misinformed,
Please take into account my reply published on the same page, a few diffs later: https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Community_Wishlist_Survey_2022/...
In a nutshell, the voting results are instructions for the Community Tech team. Since our team can't hire another team, such wishes, unfortunately, can't be voted upon. Instead, these become "larger suggestions" which will be shared with the leadership of the Product department at the Wikimedia Foundation.
I invite you to discuss the details on the Survey talk page: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Community_Wishlist_Survey
Best,
Szymon Grabarczuk (he/him)
Community Relations Specialist
Wikimedia Foundation
On Tue, Jan 25, 2022 at 7:18 AM Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:
so much for all the assurances here https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Community_Wishlist_Survey_2022/... Out of scope for our team, which I hope is obvious
On Sun, 23 Jan 2022 at 12:26, Gnangarra gnangarra@gmail.com wrote:
Commons issues raised in https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2022/Multimedia_an...
On Sat, 15 Jan 2022 at 05:16, Bodhisattwa Mandal < bodhisattwa.rgkmc@gmail.com> wrote:
Maybe, the Community Tech team should start picking up long standing issues first which are being proposed repetitively almost every year but do not get adequate votes to receive their attention.
On Sat, Jan 15, 2022, 00:59 Mike Peel email@mikepeel.net wrote:
Not sure if the opening of the Wishlist has been announced here yet? But it seems to be open for proposals until the 23rd.
Which means I get to propose fixing a simple technical question for the fifth time in the wishlist: does this page exist?
Seriously.
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey_2022/Miscellaneous...
Thanks, Mike
On 5/1/22 16:10:37, Natalia Rodriguez wrote:
Hey all, Nice to meet many of you for the first time! Thanks for your feedback and for raising larger concerns around resource allocation at the Foundation. These concerns are extremely valid-- especially the ones around allocating resources for less supported platforms such as
Commons
and broken infrastructure. The wishlist process will begin next week with the proposal phase starting Jan 10.
In the email thread, I identified some open questions about the
Wishlist
process so I am answering them here.
- Can we vote/focus on the maintenance of tools rather than new
tools?
o Yes. The wishes that we work on do not have to be associated with a new tool. In the past we’ve taken on projects that were maintenance related. For example, in the last year, we took on improvement projects for Wikisource Export and Wikisource OCR tools, among other initiatives. We also maintain and fix allthe
tools we’ve built in the past.Check out the freshdocumentation
about what qualifies as a proposal here. <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey/FAQ#How_to_create_... ?>
o Gnangarra, your points about the issues with bulk uploads in Commons would make a sound proposal-- a proposal does not have to be a new tool in the least. The part about uploading large files is out of scope for our team though (see link aboveabout
our areas of focus, the issue is infrastructural <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T86436>and too large forwhat
we can take on). I still believe there is value in suggesting it, though. o We have Talk to Us <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Wishlist_Survey/Updates/Talk_to_Us
hours on January 19-- where the entire team will be available for a video call to help folks who want to write proposals and
polish
them so that they may get selected.
- What if what we want fixed is larger than what the Community Tech team can accomplish? o This year, we will be talking directly with leadership about larger wishes that we can't fulfill ourselves. To make this possible, we will no longer be formally 'Archiving' ideas. One improvement we are implementing from conversations with all of you at past Talk to Us Hours and other places, is that we will place projects that are too large for us into a new category called “Larger Suggestions'' because we still want people to
be
able to voice those needs. We plan to share this with the Foundation's leadership during the WMF's annual planning,which
takes place in the spring. o This being said, if you have an idea that may be too large for us to take on, I would also encourage you to come to Talk toUs
Hours (link above) and see if we can help you workshop the proposal into something we can help with. If we can’t then I would still highly encourage you to propose, by all means! Chances are if you think it’s an important problem, many other members do as well. o Finally, the wishlist isn't just for Community Tech. Volunteer developers and other Wikimedia Foundation teams have taken on wishes from the wishlist. For this reason, there is a chance that a wish may not be appropriate for our team, but it can be addressed by someone else.
- Why isn’t the WMF fixing what we feel are be the most urgently needed fixes in functionality? o This is a larger question that gets answered at the board and C-leadership levels. There are also some relatively new teams
at
the Foundation, such as Architecture and Platform Engineering, that aim to improve the technical infrastructure overall inthe
years to come. However, every team can help with the answerand
Community Tech can help with communication of technical needs. This “Larger Suggestions” collection of wishes I mentioned in the previous answer will not be a silver bullet that fixes all of the problems, but I believe in the power of incrementalsteps
to steer us in that direction.
- How can we communicate the urgency of the fixes that we need? o I don’t believe there is any lack of documentation of concerns about functionality that is broken. Folks are right to point
out
that it’s about synthesizing what is most urgently broken, the maintenance that is really necessary, and surfacing it to leadership. We, the Community Tech team, had a lot of hard conversations about how to handle this because we never wantto
mislead anyone into thinking we are going to work on ideasthat
are too large for our team. However, we all collectively cameto
the conclusion that we should still be the team that gives people the space to voice what they need from a technical perspective. o The wishlist itself can communicate urgency. If you submit a detailed wish (the more details, the better!), and if the wish receives a high number of votes, we definitively know as ateam
that it's urgent and high-priority. From there, we have the information we need to take next steps. This may involvetaking
on the wish ourselves or communicating the wish to leadership.
- Does the Community Tech team work in isolation? o No, we constantly collaborate with other teams at the
Foundation
and most importantly, with all of you. This year our goal isto
share the top wishes with other product managers who are responsible for products related to the categories in the wishlist. This way, they may incorporate relevant wishes into their team's roadmap, or they will at least consider community requests as they plan upcoming work. We always check to see if other teams are already working on solutions related to whatis
asked inside of the Wishlist. We plan to do more and are energized that the conversation is already beginning to happen in this thread.
- Why is the Community Tech team so small? Why can't more people be hired, or why can't a second Community Tech team be formed? o As a team, we deeply believe in our work, and we hope to keep growing. We know how important it is to work directly with community members and fulfill community requests. If you want our team to grow, one of the best ways you can champion us is
to
participate in the wishlist. As participation rates grow (and they have!), the more effectively we can advocate for our team and its resources.P.S. We are still welcoming help to promote the survey and to
translate
the updated documentation. Thanks for reading.
Best, Natalia Rodriguez Senior Product Manager, Community Tech
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