[discovery] Discovery Team Updates

We’d like to notify our community about a few project updates and personnel moves that will affect the Discovery team. Earlier this year, the Discovery Department was split up into two main teams - Search Platform that is under Technology and the Discovery team that is under the Audiences:Readers umbrella. Now that the search frontend UI/UX work has wrapped up and the Wikipedia.org portal has been modernized, we are consolidating as a team focusing on the Search backend. Our frontend responsibilities are moving onto other teams with the Readers team. Here’s a breakdown by project: - We are putting the final touches on the automation of statistics and translations updates for the Wikipedia.org portal page. This will enable the stats and translations to be automatically updated on a weekly basis with minimal involvement by humans. [1][2] - The Maps initiative will be moving to be a part of the Readers Infrastructure team and we’re currently investigating a new open-sourced backend map tile server replacement. [3] - We will be communicating soon about any impact this will have on Discovery projects. [4] - The Search Platform team will continue enhancing and refining the machine learning-to-rank backend functionality while expanding our language support. [5] Our frontend team members will be integrated into the rest of the organization over the next few weeks: - Deb Tankersley will take on the Program Manager (Engineering) role in Technology - Jan Drewniak will move to Readers Mobile Web - Paul Norman will move to Readers Infrastructure - Mikhail Popov and Chelsy Xie will remain in Readers and begin working on new projects while assisting in a part-time basis with search analysis Cheers, The Discovery Team [1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T140159 [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikipedia.org_Portal [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Maps [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Discovery/Search -- deb tankersley Product Manager, Discovery Wikimedia Foundation