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
On Mon, 2017-07-03 at 23:11 +0200, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
Who is going to work on MediaWiki internationalisation?
The Global Collaboration team.
andre
On Tue, Jul 4, 2017 at 7:00 AM, Andre Klapper aklapper@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Mon, 2017-07-03 at 23:11 +0200, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:
Who is going to work on MediaWiki internationalisation?
The Global Collaboration team.
For the immediate future we are maintaining current status of coverage of areas under maintenance of the merging teams. In the mean time, we are working out transition details that will be more meaningful in long term preservation and support of critical areas like i18n, inside MediaWiki and Wikimedia projects. We will follow up soon with more helpful documentation on-wiki, hopefully by the end of this week.
If there are any urgent technical issues, please follow the channels currently in use to communicate with the development teams (preferably phabricator). There are no changes to that workflow at the moment.
Hope this is helpful.
Thanks Runa
wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org