Community Tech
Community Tech
We leverage the Wishlist to collaborate with editors, volunteer developers, and other Wikimedia teams to turn community-identified needs into real solutions, and work on priority wishes.
The team
🛠️ How We Work
[edit]We are a small team with limited resources, and balance our efforts across three categories:
- Building tooling to advance the Community Wishlist
- Maintenance of existing tools and features supported by the Community Tech team
- Delivering on wishes, primarily by adopting Focus Areas supported by volunteers.
When we say "no" to a given request, we are merely stating it goes against our current priorities.
When working and communicating with us:
- Please be calm, civil, and assume we’re working in good faith.
- We aim to respond promptly but can't guarantee immediate replies.
- Sometimes, we may need to close a conversation if it takes too much of our time or attention.
- We can not handle projects on another team's roadmap or ones that conflict with their work, but we will direct you to the right person when possible.
- We can not discuss staffing or confidential issues.
Current selected projects
[edit]Community Tech is currently wrapping up carry-over work from the 2023 Wishlist. Beginning in 2024-25, the team will adopt community-supported Focus Areas via the new Community Wishlist.
| Projects | Project status |
|---|---|
| Multiblocks |
 In development |
| Sharing QR codes |
 Done |
| Edit-Recovery Feature |
Done |
| Template recall and discovery |
In development |
📢 Latest Updates
[edit]May 14, 2025: Multiblocks, Favourite templates, and upcoming Wishlist improvements
[edit]Multiblocks, the #14 wish in the Community Wishlist Survey 2023, has been successfully released on four wikis (Polish, German, Italian and Hebrew Wikipedia) and will begin mass deployment by the end of the month: all non-Wikipedia projects plus Catalan Wikipedia will adopt Multiblocks on the week of May 26, while all other Wikipedias will adopt it on the week of June 2. Consult our current deployment schedule on Phabricator to know more.
With Multiblocks, admins get more block options: a sitewide and a partial block can run at the same time with different expiry dates. This eliminates the need to wait for the expiration of one block to apply the other. An admin may want to initially impose a temporary sitewide block on a disruptive user, and later keep their access to specific pages or namespaces restricted. This may be useful in cases of blocking Wikipedians heavily involved in editing specific namespaces or pages.
We are also working on Favourite Templates, a new feature that was suggested by several users, that will provide a better way for new and experienced contributors to recall and discover templates via the template dialog. We hope this will increase dialog usage and the number of templates added.
Since 2013, experienced volunteers have asked for a more intuitive template selector, exposing popular or most-used templates on the templates dialog. At this stage of work, we are focusing on allowing users to put templates in a “favourite” list, so that their reuse will be easier. We are currently exploring additional ways to help users discover or find templates, and welcome your ideas and feedback.
We will involve Polish and Arabic Wikipedias for piloting this new feature, and we are already evaluating involving other projects for a second phase of piloting. We will keep you posted about this.
Lastly we are working on some improvements to the Wishlist:
- we are exploring new ways to update the status of the focus areas and wishes, to make them more clear to users;
- we will introduce a better way to categorise wishes, as requested, as well as ordering them by date of creation, to make them more browsable;
- and finally, we will introduce (in the upcoming months, probably July-September 2025) a way for users to support individual wishes, and not just focus areas.
We also want to discuss one more consideration for the Wishlist, which we’d like your input. As WMF product teams and developers work off Phabricator to prioritize tasks, some teams have asked for a tighter integration between the Wishlist and Phabricator, so they can evaluate wishes and Phabricator tasks when they prioritize work. We’ve evaluated the data, and approximately 30% of wishes have a Phabricator task already. What is the ideal relationship between the Wishlist and Phabricator, and how should that be represented?
Further information
[edit]- Team Processes
- Development
- Maintenance
- Team Documentation (Drafts in progress)
- Community Tech/Phabricator criteria
