Systematic approach to improve satisfaction and productivity (read on Meta wiki )
In order to increase the Sustainability of Our Movement in terms of technology and people, we should engage new people in the development of our platform, specifically from third-parties. The term “third-party” here refers to external developers who are not part of the Wikimedia movement, but who contribute to improving the MediaWiki software. There are many opportunities to encourage those developers to make more contributions. Ongoing projects like Wikibase and Parsoid are providing those in certain contexts, but there is room to grow.
- Active engagement of third party ecosystems in the development of MediaWiki technologies (e.g. Wikibase and Parsoid).
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Hi, we have prepared a report summarizing strategic data and activities related to the recommendation Increase the Sustainability of Our Movement, focusing on projects led by the Wikimedia Foundation. It includes a section about this initiative that I’m copying here for convenience and automatic translations.
Implementing this initiative requires collaborating with software development organizations or projects outside of Wikimedia to make our platform more sustainable.
The Wikimedia technical infrastructure has always relied on many third-party software products and libraries developed by multiple open-source projects. These are some of the most notable collaborations in the past years:
The Technical Collaboration team continues coordinating Wikimedia’s participation in these two international developer outreach programs:
- Google Summer of Code is an annual program for students and open-source beginners. Currently, it has 9 Wikimedia projects accepted, covering areas like Abstract Wikipedia or Structured Data on Commons. Past projects include rewriting the Wikidata infobox, the Campaigns Retention Metrics Dashboard, and the Edit Request Wizard.
- Outreachy provides internships in open source and open science to people subject to systemic bias and impacted by underrepresentation in the technical industry where they are living. Currently, it has three projects accepted, about Research imbalances in translation between languages on Wikipedia, Research imbalances in translation between languages on Wikipedia, and Write a Ruby gem for analyzing Wikidata edits. This program runs twice every year, the Foundation funds most of its internships, and there have been more than 70 internships.
GSoC and Outreachy have brought many new developers to Wikimedia, many of them repeating as mentors after completing their own internships, and some of them thriving as volunteer developers or staff at the Foundation. A recent example is Jay Prakash, former GSoC intern and awarded Wikimedian of the Year 2021 Tech Innovator winner.