Wikimedia Developers,
With the change to a new annual plan and fiscal year, we’ve made some
changes to how the Contributors team, formerly known as the Editing
department, is organized. I believe these changes will help us better serve
our communities and make judicious use of donor funds, by making our teams
more capable of taking on large projects while maintaining production
software. I also believe these changes will better support for our staff by
helping many of them who have been wearing many hats for a long time
achieve greater focus.
The first and most significant change is that the Language and
Collaboration teams have merged to become the Global Collaboration team.
Runa Bhattacharjee, who has managed the Language team since 2014, will
manage the new combined team. Roan Kattouw, who has led and managed the
Collaboration team for the past two years, has now taken off his people
manager hat, and is now focused on being the Lead Engineer of the new team.
By merging, this new team will have the ability to incorporate engineering,
design, QA and community engagement more fluidly, meeting the specific
needs of each project and allowing team members to share their individual
expertise to a greater number of products.
Additionally, as Toby mentioned last month, the Dan Garry has joined the
team responsible for editing tools like VisualEditor, allowing James to
step away from his 5-year stint as the Product Manager for VisualEditor and
focus on leading product for Contributors. With this change comes a new
name for the VisualEditor team, which is now (back to being called) the
Editing team.
It will likely take some time for these changes to fully propagate through
all the wikis and development tools and many staff are currently in
transitional roles. If you have any questions about these changes, please
let me know and I’ll do my best to help you.
Thanks,
Trevor Parscal
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- Trevor