*
Hey all,
For the last 18 months, the Engineering & Product Development department
has been experimenting with the role of “Community Liaison, Product
Development” - a staff member embedded in the Product team and tasked with
factoring community concerns into our software development process, keeping
editors informed about what we’re doing, and maintaining a dialogue between
those who write code and those who write articles.
While there is always room for improvement, I think this role has shown a
lot of promise. We have a number of large projects coming down the
pipeline (e.g., visual editor, discussion systems) and we need more help
reaching out to our contributor communities, especially our non-English
speaking projects, as our outreach there has traditionally been challenged.
We’d like to recruit a small number of English-speaking or multilingual
editors to do the Community Liaison job with different development teams
and focuses.
In particular we’re looking for people with a strong history of
contributions to our projects who can provide sound and reasoned judgment
and are trusted to do so by their community. Speaking other languages in
addition to English is a major plus, as one of the objectives here is to
ensure we can properly interact with and support non-English projects.
I’ve included the full job description below.
Our immediate need is for help with the Visual Editor. We’d like to hire a
few community liaisons to help inform different Wikipedia language
communities of the upcoming launch, create spaces for feedback and
discussion, synthesize feedback for the Visual Editor team, and other
activities required to support the Visual Editor launch later this year.
If this is a role that would interest you, please e-mail Philippe Beaudette
at pbeaudette(a)wikimedia.org<https://mail.google.com/mail/?view=cm&fs=1&tf=1&to=pbeaudette@wikimedia.org>.
And if you know someone else who might fit the role, let them know about
it :-). We’re provisionally interested in hiring 2-3 liaisons, at an hourly
rate commensurate with experience. This can be a part-time role, but we’ll
need at least 15 hours/week for the length of the engagement (minimum 3
months). Please do apply if you think it’s a role that suits you, and if
you find places we haven’t notified, spread the word!
Thanks.
Howie
*
_________________________
Howie Fung
Director of Product Development
Wikimedia Foundation
*
Community Liaison Job Description
Background Information and Statement of Purpose
The Wikimedia Foundation’s Engineering & Product Development Department is
looking at ways to more effectively incorporate broad community
perspectives in decisions and hold dialogues with our editors about the
scope, pace and features of upcoming changes to Wikimedia projects. As part
of this, it is hiring additional Community Liaisons from our volunteer
community.
Scope of Work
Support and improve our ongoing software development projects, in
particular:
-
Building up a network of volunteers from both English language and
non-English language wikis, increasing the number of projects we can
interact with;
-
Engaging the community in the software development process, by acting as
a conduit for community questions, bugs and and feature requests, talking
to editors about our work and how they can participate in it effectively,
and recruiting them for workgroups and studies;
-
Being available from time to time to provide expertise and knowledge
about our projects, including but not limited to training
externally-sourced staff in the way our projects work, answering their
questions, and providing expert advice on an ad-hoc basis;
-
Ensuring that our community is represented in the decision-making
process and that our planned software adequately reflects user needs;
-
Monitoring Wikimedia projects, with the assistance of a network of
volunteers, for emerging issues that have an impact on Engineering
programmes; and
-
Other duties as needed.
Requirements
Effective Community Liaisons will be:
-
Experienced users of Wikimedia projects, capable of representing our
community within the Foundation and vice-versa.
-
Strong communicators (both verbally and with the written word), able to
explain our products to different groups of users with different levels of
technical understanding.
-
Able to focus on the larger picture, understanding which concerns and
views are widespread and which are marginal or individual.
-
Approachable, as both users and product developers must be able to trust
these people for the relationship to function.
-
Self-motivated - they will be given important projects and expected to
execute with little to no supervision.
-
Strongly empathetic - they excel at understanding the perspectives of
others and bridging the gap between different approaches to the world.
-
Willing and able to remain resilient in the face of frustration from our
users, in order to get the job done.
Pluses
Other positive attributes or areas of knowledge include:
-
Diverse language skills. While the Wikimedia Foundation communicates
internally in English, we aim to be able to talk to our different
communities natively.
-
Experience with the software development process. You will be thrown
into teams that are actively working on new features; having a background
that reduces the slope of your learning curve is a plus.
- Familiarity with multiple Wikimedia projects is a major plus; we are
about more than just Wikipedia.
*
Hello Ambassadors!
See below for the deployment highlights for next week.
One thing I did want to additionally make note of for everyone on this
list is that the CodeEditor extension will be updated to also allow
editing of JavaScript and CSS files. See this bug more the details:
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=39653
However, that change (CodeEditor) isn't going live next week. Instead,
it'll go out with the start of the MediaWiki 1.22wmf5 rollout,
beginning on May 27th.
I just wanted to give you all a little more lead time on it.
Thanks!
Greg
----- Forwarded message from Greg Grossmeier <greg(a)wikimedia.org> -----
> Date: Fri, 17 May 2013 11:51:22 -0700
> From: Greg Grossmeier <greg(a)wikimedia.org>
> To: Wikimedia developers <wikitech-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org>, Development and Operations engineers
> <engineering(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
> Subject: Deployment Highlights - Week of May 20th, 2013
>
> Hello and welcome to the latest installment of the Deployment Highlights
> email.
>
> The full calendar for next week lives at:
> https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Deployments#Week_of_May_20th
>
> For the week of May 6th we have the following interesting deployments:
>
> == All Week ==
>
> * Due to a security update to the Linux kernel, we will be upgrading and
> rebooting ALL machines throughout the week. This may affect your
> experience with some services, but it should be minimal.
>
>
> == Monday ==
>
> * VisualEditor will be deploy a new extension, TemplateData, to all
> Wikipedias (<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=44444>) in
> addition to a VisualEditor configuration change on mediawiki.org
> (<https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=48430>).
>
> * English Wikipedia will be updated to MediaWiki version 1.22wmf4, in
> addition to a WikiData client update on English Wikipedia. See
> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/Roadmap>
>
> * An update to HTCP purging will be rolled out by the WMF Operations
> team which might create momentary issues with some thumbnails. Please
> report any issues you experience.
>
>
> == Wednesday ==
>
> * The rest of the Wikipedias will be updated to MediaWiki 1.22wmf4, thus
> completing the roll out of that version. The next version, 1.22wmf5,
> will start on Monday May 27th. See
> <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MediaWiki_1.22/Roadmap>
>
>
> == Thursday ==
>
> * The Editor Engagement team (E2) will rollout bugfixes to Notifications
> (Echo). See <http://etherpad.wikimedia.org/echo-release>.
>
>
> Best,
>
> Greg
>
> --
> | Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
> | identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
----- End forwarded message -----
--
| Greg Grossmeier GPG: B2FA 27B1 F7EB D327 6B8E |
| identi.ca: @greg A18D 1138 8E47 FAC8 1C7D |
Jorm, which channel are you on?
________________________________
From: "wikitech-ambassadors-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org" <wikitech-ambassadors-request(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
To: wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org
Sent: Friday, May 17, 2013 8:00 AM
Subject: Wikitech-ambassadors Digest, Vol 19, Issue 7
Send Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list submissions to
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Today's Topics:
1. Announcing the Flow Portal(s) (Sumana Harihareswara)
----------------------------------------------------------------------
Message: 1
Date: Thu, 16 May 2013 10:08:38 -0400
From: Sumana Harihareswara <sumanah(a)wikimedia.org>
To: Coordination of technology deployments across languages/projects
<wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org>
Cc: Brandon Harris <bharris(a)wikimedia.org>
Subject: [Wikitech-ambassadors] Announcing the Flow Portal(s)
Message-ID: <5194E866.8070405(a)wikimedia.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=UTF-8
From: Brandon Harris <bharris(a)wikimedia.org>
Hello!
As many of you know, the Wikimedia Foundation is now actively engaged
in designing a next-generation discussion and workflow system called
Flow, initially slated to replace user talk pages. Flow is an ambitious
project (on par with the VisualEditor) and will touch nearly every
aspect of the Wikimedia experience.
We need ''your'' help and input. We have started a portal for
information and discussion.
You can find it on the English Wikipedia here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flow
And on MediaWiki here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal
(We'll be creating one on meta as well).
At the Flow portal, you can read about what we're doing and why, as
well as play around with an interactive prototype.
We're desperately interested in your feedback and thoughts. There are
things that we know, and things that we know that we don't know. But
there are also things that we *don't* know that we don't know. And we
want to reduce that lack of knowledge.
We will also be conducting additional office hours for a variety of
timezones - as many as we need to - and will also be open to having
conversations via Google hangouts and/or Skype as need be. I am always
around on irc (freenode, username "jorm") and am willing to answer any
questions you may have.
-b.
---
Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
------------------------------
_______________________________________________
Wikitech-ambassadors mailing list
Wikitech-ambassadors(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-ambassadors
End of Wikitech-ambassadors Digest, Vol 19, Issue 7
***************************************************
From: Brandon Harris <bharris(a)wikimedia.org>
Hello!
As many of you know, the Wikimedia Foundation is now actively engaged
in designing a next-generation discussion and workflow system called
Flow, initially slated to replace user talk pages. Flow is an ambitious
project (on par with the VisualEditor) and will touch nearly every
aspect of the Wikimedia experience.
We need ''your'' help and input. We have started a portal for
information and discussion.
You can find it on the English Wikipedia here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Flow
And on MediaWiki here: http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow_Portal
(We'll be creating one on meta as well).
At the Flow portal, you can read about what we're doing and why, as
well as play around with an interactive prototype.
We're desperately interested in your feedback and thoughts. There are
things that we know, and things that we know that we don't know. But
there are also things that we *don't* know that we don't know. And we
want to reduce that lack of knowledge.
We will also be conducting additional office hours for a variety of
timezones - as many as we need to - and will also be open to having
conversations via Google hangouts and/or Skype as need be. I am always
around on irc (freenode, username "jorm") and am willing to answer any
questions you may have.
-b.
---
Brandon Harris, Senior Designer, Wikimedia Foundation
Support Free Knowledge: http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Donate
James Forrester, 12/05/2013 19:56:
> On 12 May 2013 10:40, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> James Forrester, 12/05/2013 19:20:
>>
>> Sorry for the disruption to everyone's plans. If you have any questions,
>>> please do ask.
>>>
>>
>> Will you still make the lists and send out the notifications so that
>> people can start planning?
>
>
> Yes.
Lovely. This is very good news, many people will be happy. :)
Nemo
All,
The developer team at Wikimedia is making some changes to how accounts
work, as part of our on-going efforts to provide new and better tools
for our users (like cross-wiki notifications). These changes will mean
users have the same account name everywhere, will let us give you new
features that will help you edit & discuss better, and will allow more
flexible user permissions for tools. One of the pre-conditions for
this is that user accounts will now have to be unique across all 900
Wikimedia wikis.[0]
Unfortunately, some accounts are currently not unique across all our
wikis, but instead clash with other users who have the same account
name. To make sure that all of these users can use Wikimedia's wikis
in future, we will be renaming a number of accounts to have "~” and
the name of their wiki added to the end of their accounts' name. This
change will take place on or around 27 May. For example, a user called
“Example” on the Swedish Wiktionary who will be renamed would become
“Example~svwiktionary”.
All accounts will still work as before, and will continue to be
credited for all their edits made so far. However, users with renamed
accounts (whom we will be contacting individually) will have to use
the new account name when they log in.
It will now only be possible for accounts to be renamed globally; the
RenameUser tool will no longer work on a local basis - since all
accounts must be globally unique - therefore it will be withdrawn from
bureaucrats' tool sets. It will still be possible for users to ask on
Meta for their account to be renamed further, if they do not like
their new user name, once this takes place.
A copy of this note is posted to meta [1] for translation. Please
forward this to your local communities, and help get it translated.
Individuals who are affected will be notified via talk page and e-mail
notices nearer the time.
[0] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Unified_login
[1] - https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Single_User_Login_finalisation_announcement
Yours,
--
James D. Forrester
Product Manager, VisualEditor
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester
Hi,
A discussion has started on-wiki about a global watchlist, and other
related improvements to the watchlist feature.
A few people have started to organize the various bug reports about
watchlists, but there is still much to do before we have a clear &
prioritized vision of what the watchlist feature should become.
Improving a feature as used and central as the watchlist has the
potential of drastically improving the users' experience, but is also
likely to cause an outcry if proper research isn't done in advance,
given that everyone has their own workflow.
Improving the watchlist feature isn't trivial, and it would help
developers if users could come together and prepare clear
specifications & prioritized features in advance.
I'd like to find a few people interested in working together to better
define the possible improvements, organize bug reports, prioritize
them into proper specifications, etc. in order to guide developers
who'd be interested in implementing these changes.
Are you interested in working on proposing a better watchlist feature?
(or spreading the word to your local community to see if other people
are interested?)
If so, your input would be appreciated there:
* Discussion: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Watchlist_wishlist
* Draft product page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Watchlist_wishlist
More information, quoted from my comment on the talk page:
====================================
I think it would really help if someone could consolidate the existing
discussions, bugs, feature requests, etc. on a page. The main focus of
the page would be on a watchlist that works across wikis, but the page
could probably also benefit from prioritization of other related
features and enhancements of the watchlist interface itself.
Apart from prioritization, this would probably also benefit from
consolidating input from many users, to be sure that the use cases
we're talking about are consistent with how people use their
watchlists.
Basically, the questions we'd need to answer so that developers can
work on global watchlists are those:
* How do users use their watchlist?
* What would be the best way to implement a global watchlist? What
would it look like?
* What other changes would we need to make to the watchlist system and
interface to make this work?
* What other changes would we want to make to the watchlist system and
interface while we're at it?
Some of these questions can be answered by going through existing bugs
and discussions on bugzilla and wiki pages, and some will probably
require talking to users to get their perspective.
(from https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Thread:Talk:New_editor_engagement/Watchlists…
)
====================================
--
Guillaume Paumier