 Hello everybody So you're hopefully here for the midi-weekie presentation because if you're not then I'm not giving the other talk Because they apparently move some rooms around which is always fun But if you're in the right room or if you think this might be fun anyway Then by all means stick around because I hope it will be fun. So Midi-weekie we're doing stuff. It's good. Oh This actually works. I'm pleased Yeah, is anybody else using one of these fun little netbooks Anybody anybody everybody's just thinking about getting them One two See one back there. Awesome. I'm really happy with this thing Tiny little Dell it actually like fits on an airline tray table So I could actually like open it and and do stuff on it my previous computer. I Could open it enough to get at the keyboard but not to get at the keyboard and see what I was typing at the same time Kind of not good. Okay midi-weekie Hopefully, you know what midi-weekie is if you don't now's your chance midi-weekie is the fun awesome wiki engine that we created Way back in the ancient year of 2002 specifically to run wikipedia Wikipedia actually started in 2001 So there was a wikipedia before media wiki, but there was no media wiki before wikipedia It's free open software. Obviously. Otherwise. I wouldn't be here at the free open software conference and We've been using gbl version 2 we're still on gbl version 2 who knows gbl version 3 may happen some day Everyone thinks it's kind of weird and scary. We run on it pretty much You know standard kind of lamp stuff and we scale anywhere from your Crazy little home install or your shared hosting account that offers, you know, super cheap super free We have my school mphp on to you know the crazy super farm installations that we have that wikipedia or wikia or All kinds of other big hosting sites that run, you know hundreds or thousands of wikis and do all their crazy things with multiple servers and Multiple database servers and multiple kinds of servers and ten layers of caching and insane stuff that most people don't have to worry about Lucky them wikipedia Probably you've heard of it. If you haven't Then maybe you haven't been on the internet for a while It's an open content encyclopedia Free wonderful. We love sharing blah blah blah The actual content is all created by the volunteer community just sort of popping up doing cool stuff So if you see anything on wikipedia that you don't like Please don't call us at the office in San Francisco because we didn't actually write it Everything's running on open source software top to bottom a lot of stuff that we've written ourselves such as media Wiki and various little fun tools for Certain kinds of monitoring low balancing blah blah blah and then a bunch of standard stuff all your you know your regular lamp stuff and squid proxy for our HTTP caching All kinds of fun things we've been contributing back patches to you know all those things that we use We love it to bits and all the custom software that we write is done in an open source manner With a combination of staff developers volunteer developers Third-party contractors whatever but all working in an open Subversion repository Open bug tracker open mailing lists all that fun stuff We like it meet wiki foundation You may or may not have heard of us. We are the actual silly company that Performs the operation of Wikipedia. We're not writing it. We're just running the servers and providing some of the infrastructure and Fun stuff around that We actually formed it as a nonprofit company in 2003 after a couple years of just sort of you know stuff being around When you're just starting up a new project, it's very easy to just you know You just throw it up you throw it upon a few servers and see what happens and then eventually you know There are legal questions or questions about you know what's gonna happen in the future blah blah blah and that's where you start to do all these Actual organization creation and actually took a couple years from 2003 on to get to the point where There wasn't just like one person in the foundation so I was actually brought on as I think the first employee in 2005 two years after we started the company and We're only now getting to the point where we have more than like three people on the tech staff. We now have Five in-house developers a couple system administrators and then several additional Contract workers which we were generally taking out of the existing volunteer development community Which is something that we absolutely love to be able to do supporting our contributors back in Actually, you know seriously working on creating the awesome things that we use and just to get a general idea of the size of our operation our Budget for this fiscal year Entire budget for the entire company about six million dollars. That's not a huge amount of money for what is a very very large website in terms of the I believe comscore statistics all of our websites together make up something like the number four total Website and we're just behind like Yahoo and Google and Something else and I don't know maybe AOL Believe it or not people still use them back to software. So way back when 2001 we actually started using a pre-existing Wiki engine which was use mod wiki now the wonderful thing about use mod is it's really easy to install It's a single pearl script Bam single pearl script put it on your server set up as CGI have a director you can write to wow you got a wiki it's awesome and For better or for worse our mock-up has derived from use mod system so we have kind of you know weird little things for The way that we do bold and italic and links and blah blah blah and that all derives out of the use mod system So we maintain pretty much compatibility with that over the years But sometimes it's kind of quirky and kind of weird and then of course we've extended it in fun bizarre ways to add tables and templates and And so there's you know much scariness in the markup, but that's the wonders of backwards compatibility Now the basic problem with use mod Was that it just really wasn't built to scale for a small site Just fine, but when you know after about a year we got to you know 10 20,000 pages We had a lot of people editing simultaneously the system didn't really have a good way of Protecting against multiple people editing simultaneously it theoretically did it had a lock file and Whenever someone was actually making a save it it saved the lock file and then you would wait until the lock file was removed And then somebody else would save But sometimes it would forget to remove the lock file So it would just sort of break for a few hours until someone went in and fixed it fun little stuff like that So we went ahead and decided to create some specific software just for wikipedia that would be Developed specifically for our needs and this was built initially by Magnus Manskey a volunteer developer from Germany who You know one hand just said okay, you know we've been talking about this ridges I'm just going to do it so went in built it You know using the PHP my as well stack A lot of us who were kind of poking around at it It was really our first big PHP project and some of us well We didn't really know what we were doing and so it was really very exciting and fun and new and Once we deployed the first version in in February 2002 about a year after Wikipedia started We found that well, it sort of worked We actually had serious performance problems with it because well, we forgot to put indexes on the tables and You know a little newbie mistakes like that So it ended up kind of getting totally rewritten based on our actual experience having deployed it What was good? What was bad? What needed to be redone and by July? the Daniel Crocker and a few others of us had just sort of poked it around and Completely redone it so it was built on a similar model as that initial version of the PHP code But I think just a little bit different and a little bit more geared towards efficiency The downside with this is that I had to add Unicode support back in three times on each version of the software That kind of sucked But the good news was that it was actually a workable code base and we've actually been Developing that same code base ever since And it evolved into what is today's media wiki Which has become a little more general than just the Wikipedia script as we originally called it So over time we started adding things like an actual installer that people could use to install the software The original version you had to be running as root on your server to install media wiki and Run a command line script which copied the files into the right location and if you did anything wrong it broke and destroyed your site So that was kind of not good. So once we had you know a basic little web friendly installer You know, it's not the greatest thing ever, but it works people are able to actually set it up as a third-party site we had a Few people come in and redo the UI we went from I Don't have any screenshots with me. Unfortunately, but our old UI was very plain very drab Very kind of hideous our new UI is very pretty or at least it's you know pretty for 2003-2004 probably needs a few improvements now We redid the database schema to be more efficient for scalability issues We removed a lot of the hard-coded instances of wikipedia in the user interface So now if you're not wikipedia it actually makes sense to use media wiki now over the years we have seen a lot of increase in activity in The actual development of the software so I've got a little graph here of commits to our subversion server for each month from 2001 when actually it was a CVS server All the way down to this last month You know back in the old days we had a few commits Now we're getting to where we're over a thousand commits every month just on media wiki and It's associated projects And not only do we have this increase in total commits We have an increase in the number of people actually doing the activity Actually doing the contributions we had a few contributors back in the day Last month we actually had it looks like 59 Individual people making a commit during that month So that's a lot of people doing some specialized work working on maybe a particular extension or working just on Localization issues or working just on the installer. We have a guy who pretty much just does updates to our Lucene-based search engine all kinds of Things both on the core and the extensions to media wiki huge amount of activity going on So we've seen this this big growth in the actual development community Which has pluses and minuses So one of the minuses of course is that the core developers who are actually You know those of us employed by wiki media to make sure that media wiki Exists and does the needs of wikipedia Well, we haven't really increased that much. There's still just a very small number of us and we have a limited amount of attention unfortunately and We're still kind of scattered and not always getting as much done as we want So a lot of our core attention in the last few years has been on scaling performance specific features that wiki media needs like oh we need to make sure our Fundraiser works we need to you know do a bunch of stuff to make sure that this whole fundraiser season works because otherwise You know if we don't run our fundraiser at the end of the year, we're gonna run out of money and Not be able to run the site. That's kind of bad So that becomes a priority and something we're not able to do something else Of course in the last year, we've finally gotten to the point where we've been able to hire a few more people on in the core area So Tom where you sitting you're hiding in there. There's Tom us back there awesome, dude Tom us worked on our fundraiser stuff this year so that I didn't have to I was able to do other stuff Yeah, that was good. So we're able now to do a little more things Sort of maintain more stuff have fewer bottlenecks in the central Central core developers, but Still kind of working on One of those things that I've been doing is late last year I created a code review extension to media wiki Which be there? Here we go Which basically integrates in our updates all the commits into the subversion system into the wiki for Review in there And yes, that's C-bend right there Wow, you've been committing a lot You've been busy So we've got a you know a nice little list of everything's going in And then people are able to mark that reviewed or not reviewed or problematic Let's see if I can find something a little more exciting There we go so here we have a problem commit Which was identified by people you know while I was When was this yeah, I was on a plane or something so You know, I didn't actually have to review this myself other people went ahead and took a look over it We have comments down there people encounter problems and it's been marked as fixed and If I log in I could actually probably go ahead and and mark it as no longer being a fix me But I don't think I have to do that because I think you guys can do it so that's pretty awesome helping to reduce the bottlenecks there and Looks like I've fallen back out Yes, open office presenter is still a little new and exciting to me I'm actually for the first time in quite a while switching my presentations back to Linux from my old Mac I love my Mac, but it's just too damn big Netbooks are great. So what's going on right now? We have We're starting to put these code review processes into place It's helping, but we're still seeing some problems We're starting to do a Actual scheduled code review sequence or every week every Tuesday. I'll go ahead and make sure I run through everything that's been going on Fix up any remaining problems and push it out live, and I'm seeing that Going through a week's worth of stuff actually takes all day Which is kind of bad because then if I miss a week it takes two days Which is a long time So we definitely still want to have some improvements in the processes there But we have now stuff in place to be able to share a lot of those responsibilities. There is a quarterly release 1.14 of media weeky imminent Tim is working on it right now pushing out that release. It should be pretty awesome and We have a bunch of extensions that are being worked on right now by folks in the office and elsewhere That we're going to be pushing out pretty soon edit drafts Also putting in a abuse filter extension, which is able to sort of reintegrate a lot of the basic identification and tagging of problematic edits that are very specific repeatable patterns and can be seen very easily and Either just stopping them outright or tagging them for human review in a somewhat easier fashion So big stuff coming up one of the big things we're going to be doing this year. We started the Wikipedia usability project. We've got a grant from Stanton Foundation to go ahead and hire a couple of additional people specifically to do this so we have We are currently hiring for a Interaction designer to do usability testing and actual you know specific design and just review of user interface problems going on and a couple of developers specifically to implement that stuff and Most importantly to actually find what's already out there that we can go ahead and pull in with relatively little work There's a lot of extensions customizations Editions that have already been done based on either usability testing specifically such as the Unimiki extensions and Some tests that have been sponsored in the past by some German universities Custom Setups on various third-party sites Wikia, Wikihau Lots of others a lot of those that we can pull in either directly or uses it as an inspiration to finalize something that will actually fix up our needs So being able to have dedicated resources to Pull in existing stuff and to do actual testing to make sure. Yeah, this really works is going to be very very helpful another big thing we've got going on is Some video projects sponsored by Kaltura with the medivid project You've got Michael Dale and some others doing some advanced work with Octiora based video using free codecs and the New aug support that's it going to be in Firefox 2.1 gives us additional Assurance that yes, we will have real free video on the web and we can do awesome awesome things. There's a Online video sequencer that's being worked on as well as simply being able to More actively grab existing videos search both within our own sites on Wikimedia Commons and to pull in freely licensed files from other sites such as the internet archive Such as Flickr that have appropriate tagging of freely licensed images and videos all kinds of awesome stuff going on And hopefully we'll be able to start rolling some of that out later this year So what else is going on? There are a huge number of awesome awesome things that have been going on in the media space for quite some time one of the coolest projects out there is semantic media wiki Which is an extension to media wiki which adds capabilities to Store data relationships between articles based on articles And then being able to query that data back display things in useful tables display sensible lists This has a potential on a site like Wikipedia to eliminate a lot of the sort of manual drudgery in maintenance of Certain kinds of lists information tables sharing of data between articles possibly between Different language sites have appropriately set up Lots of fun cool stuff It's been worked on for several years. It's very mature. We would love to be able to Actually start integrating this so in the next few months. We'll we should be able to set up some actual testing Of you know, what are the actual needs? As far as you know, is it going to impact the database is it going to impact scalability? We know that this stuff is awesome. We know that we want it Let's make it happen. So semantic media wiki better support for translate wiki or beta wiki it's a lot of Localization going on from all these awesome people Pretty much as soon as I've made a commit There's a translation in like five languages Sometimes before I make my next commit. There's already something in Hebrew from my last commit then there's six versions of German and Chinese and who knows what else Tends to get kind of fun It's pretty exciting and there's a lot of other, you know little bits and pieces form editors improvements for working with tables multiple sections little whizzy wig bits Lots of things that we either want or think we could use That we're going to be finding and adapting Now one project that I like to look at here and there is WordPress Which is a fairly well-known? open source blogging software Like a media wiki. It's open source based on a lamp stack Is frequently thought of as being too big and bloated? And yet it often seems to be best of breed in many situations and there's billions of people using it WordPress has been making a lot of progress over the last year They've been actually doing big pushes on usability Fixing up their user interface identifying real problems with usage and Doing public mock-ups of new user interfaces surveying people to see what kind of works actually doing some user testing and just generally getting people very involved in the process of Making new things happen. I've been very excited to see that every time I upgrade my blog suddenly the Administrator console is a billion times easier to use if we can get that going on media wiki. I'll be very happy Back at the home office Yeah, pretty much already said most of this We're hiring or have been hiring a few more people to You know do some of the dirty work, so Basically what we're doing within me Within wiki media itself Our names are all too similar It gets confusing it's primarily just making sure that me wiki itself Still works making sure it works for us with scalability and then doing specific projects that we ourselves need Based on some identified strategic need So there's a lot of the additional third party development Which is going on which we love and want to encourage more and more of In addition to the usability project where we want not just our core team in San Francisco working on that but we also want everybody who's a volunteer developer to Be pitching in everybody who's a user to be pitching in with their comments And actually really you know get a community voice in there as well as just a few guys saying well I think it looks good if we move this over there. That's not what we want We want a real dynamic project that is a big awesome community thing We're also looking at the possibilities of doing more kind of intern style projects as well as Some of the specific projects contracting that we've been doing of trying to Support people who are doing volunteer development kind of bring more people in and be able to you know Really get specific projects going so that not only does something get started But it gets finished and integrated once it's usable So overall, what is it that we can media wants? Well our general organization organizational goals Which sound pretty boring our organizational maturity financial stability increase of quality and perception of quality increasing distribution beyond the weekies and encouraging and broadening participation Really, these are pretty straightforward things In so far as they apply to the technical world, which I'm in control of organizational maturity is primarily about Making sure that we actually know what we're doing making sure that on the Level of hardware and systems that we have stuff in place not just able to run the site, but Appropriate backups and redundancy. Yeah makes sense Also on the coder level it means that we want to make sure that people who are contributing code Feel welcome that they feel like Their code is welcome That contributions are not being ignored patches are getting reviewed Extensions that are useful are getting enabled New sites and configuration updates that need to be done for some community actually get done This is still somewhat of an ongoing process But it's very much one of the things we want to accomplish Additionally in those general goals one of the big things is broadening participation for users on the wiki app increasing our reach broadening our depth Get more and more people involved on the wiki sites We're trying to broaden participation make it easy for people to come in and contribute something Traditionally you know in the wiki world the way that you contribute is you edit you go on to the article you click edit You you know punch in some Information you fix something that was wrong. Maybe maybe you add a comment to the discussion page But honestly, that's a pretty high burden A pretty high bar for for a lot of newbies to reach Just because you know, it's not really obvious how some of this stuff works and Even if we make you know, wonderful was you we get it in that everyone understands just the idea of going into a Discussion page on a wiki and adding your comment. It's not really obvious how it works So we're interested in easier ways for people to just contribute a little something Maybe instead of you know going in and adding a comment on a fancy ass wiki page Maybe they can just say, you know, I like this article Maybe they can say I didn't like this article. Maybe they can say, oh, I like this article except for this bit or Just kind of you know describe what needs to be done on this. It needs some attention Maybe they can add a little text comment, but in a way that's easier for people to participate in Without necessarily being Hardcore wiki user. Yeah, that's pretty much what I said But also part of that is when people are starting to actually do the editing They frequently encounter Problems with other parts of the community. So Of course every online community has trolls and people who are just Who mean well, but they're very rude And this is a problem in in any kind of online community and certainly Wikipedia is not at all immune to that So we're gonna need to see some improvements on perhaps the social front Making sure the good behavior is encouraged bad behavior does is discouraged. This isn't always easy because Inward-facing Communities often can self-perpetuate some of that So if you're a newbie don't understand the jargon you don't understand, you know, what's going on So somebody kind of pops up out of nowhere and says, you know that you violated You know in POV RFA 3 whatever, you know, you don't know what the hell that is. I've been around for years I don't know necessarily know what the hell it is That's not too good So a little of that maybe you know some actual technical solutions can help to smooth out the workflow Smooth out the process make it easier for people to not have to actually butt heads when they're interacting But a lot of it is actually going to need some real social change that is maybe outside the scope of Just the technical area. I already said Semantic Media Week is awesome, but it bears repeating It's a good thing Flagged revisions one of the other things that we've been running experimentally for quite some time And we finally started deploying it live on the German Wikipedia a few months ago is the flag revision system And it's one of these little additions to the wiki workflow Where we take the ability to take a version of an article that we think is pretty good and market is saying yeah it's pretty good and Then maybe for just some visitor who comes in and doesn't know what's going on Maybe you'll actually get shown the yeah It's pretty good version instead of the Don't know about this yet version or at the least you'll have some indication that yes there are multiple versions and and you know we know this one has been reviewed this one has not so it helps to expose a little bit of the wacky editing process of You know what's current what isn't Which as a reader isn't necessarily very obvious Somebody who just sort of pops on to Wikipedia. Maybe he doesn't quite understand that what it says right now Isn't maybe what it said five minutes ago and isn't maybe what? Wikipedia says So being able to This sort of self-moderate and kind of speed bumps certain types of edits in theory Allows us to improve the actual Quality and perhaps the perceived quality of a wiki site by indicating that Yeah, it's it's pretty good But there are also some problems in that it does slow down some of the workflow. It creates Additional requirements to go around and make sure that things are reviewed We've had reports of there's you know a bit of a backlog at German Wikipedia There is some interested in some interest in deploying some variant of flag divisions on the English language Wikipedia, which is as the most popular one also the most likely to run into certain kinds of Problems with people going oh my article says something scary about me But we want to make sure that we actually solve some of those workflow problems So it's still an ongoing thing definitely want continue community involvement with figuring out what's actually going on on that But five visions has primarily been Oops, I didn't check my details there. I don't remember who actually was working on that. What's that for now? Awesome. Cool. That that's good. I'm glad that my memory is correct. That's always a happy thing anyway, it's been primarily maintained last few months by Aaron Schultz one of our Contract workers who's come out of our volunteer development community awesome stuff. We love it Well the other things that we've been testing and we're gonna start doing some more deployment very soon the abuse filter extension There is a whole bunch of cool new features in it, which Unfortunately, we didn't get a chance to deploy this week or I would be showing it to you right now But it adds the ability to tag edits as they come in with a certain kind of you know tag based on Some element of What the edit was it contains certain types of text it You know removed large amounts of text, you know, it looks like a certain kind of analyst and whatever so in addition to just being able to Automatically revert something which is what a lot of the third-party bot tools are doing now We can do more traditional wiki soft security models by Tagging things for human review. So maybe they'll get seen immediately maybe they'll get seen in a few minutes But by being able to tag them We actually create an environment where someone can go in and specifically pay more attention to the problem edits Instead of having to review every single thing individually And that's being developed right now by Andrew Garrett another one of our Long-time volunteer developers who's now doing some contract work for us He's actually out in San Francisco right now visiting and we've been able to do some Very tight review cycles And do get a lot of stuff done in a short amount of time. That's been really really fun And it's definitely one of the things that's encouraging me to Look more into kind of internship programs. Maybe bringing people out for you know a little time to our main office and just do some really Serious hack-fest stuff. I went a little bit into the media stuff already But that's some awesome things and additional part of that is we're now Administering a grant from the Mozilla Foundation It's either the Mozilla Foundation or the Mozilla Corporation. I forget which one they all blur together to me but one of them is illa guys to Improve some of the augura and augborbis support in Firefox both the base libraries Which not only Firefox, but a lot of other tools are using and the advanced encoder which will allow The non-patent encumbered Fiora format to actually really be pretty much head-to-head in terms of quality with Things like MPEG 4 Whereas traditionally it's been thought to be yeah, not quite as good because the first generation encoder was Not quite as good the advanced encoders starting to use features of the Fiora standard which were added After the original version of the encoder was made But they're in the baseline Fiora 1.0 spec as it was finalized and now the code is actually starting to catch up So we're helping to sponsor you know making sure that stuff actually gets done Much better support for free out of her free video on the web. We love it Mozilla loves it So all the big love fest Also, we keep looking at mobile stuff Because a lot of people these days have stuff like this little guy or Maybe if they're you know not into evil proprietary Apple stuff. Maybe they have a Android-based machine or something else There's all kinds of fun devices these days Also a lot of fun Linux based tablets like little Nokia 810 All kinds of cool stuff, but basic thing is they're relatively small They have a small screen and they have some kind of crazy internet connection. It's pretty cool So very frequently, you know, we're out at lunch in San Francisco from the office Talking some kind of bullcrap Somebody says something rather somebody else denies it's true. If only there was some way we could look it up Some kind of website. Well we can thanks to the internet so for some time we've had a Semi-experimental mobile gateway. It's currently at mobile.wikipedia.org But the version of the code that it's currently based on Has been originally targeted to older kind of you know, what based? Devices which is the older mobile phones which can get on the internet But no one really knows how or wants to if they do so People have never really used it very much, but this latest generation of Awesome new internet devices that have real browsers such as the webkit-based browsers in the iPhone the Android system Even current Blackberries have a kind of okay browser Are a lot more capable Download speeds are faster They can actually do things like show CSS and images and run some JavaScript all kinds of fun stuff so we're now working on a more capable system Which currently we have in a test rollout on m.wikipedia.org and we'll eventually start merging the two of them Which is much more advanced It's based on the original server component from the Ipedia or Iwik iPhone application, which was created by Hampton Ketlin Using a lot of Ruby based stuff. He's open sourced it for us and we're now currently doing some testing for going ahead and building that out as an Official iPhone application and then we're going to roll it out to other platforms as well Android maybe Blackberry, you know, whatever whatever else We can see support on but the primary part of it is the server side component Which does some reformatting and produces this very nice HTML page Which uses actual modern stuff, which a modern browser can render very nicely And there's just you know a little bit of a native UI that you can wrap around that for a little happier things Which can integrate a little nicer, but even just just the server side web component awesome We're having a great time with that That's currently being developed via github rather than our subversion. So that's a fun little experiment And there's an IRC channel if you want to pop right now on freeno.net into wikimedia mobile May or may not be anyone awake, but there may be some folks in there So that's an ongoing cool awesome project Currently the mobile stuff is mostly just for reading And reading wikipedia is good, but contributing back is good too It's kind of a pain right now You know if you're on your your iPhone of your G1 and you pop onto the regular wikipedia site You can in fact edit You can you can click the edit tab and and go into this giant text box and type some stuff in but man You really don't want to it's a pain the edit box is like this big and your screen is this big Yeah, that doesn't work very well But there can be a lot of usefulness to being able to contribute I've been found find that I'll run into a typo or something while I'm reading something on the road So, you know, I like to be able to go in and fix it also, maybe You're traveling maybe You find an article in some place. There's no photograph. You want to be able to take a picture of it Upload it add a little description stuff like that. Currently, we don't have any native support for that We would love to add it. So hopefully that's something that we'll be able to get going And if there's people excited about it do Come on let's make it happen So in general we have a lot of things that we want to pay attention to Not just cool new things for the future, but stuff that actually is a problem now So we want to pay a little more attention to you know, what are the problems that people are having? Both within wikipedia and for third-party users Now Mozilla runs for instance a whole bunch of different community facing Sites for, you know, very different targets and they run on various different technologies. Some of them are Specifically built some of them are wiki some of them are blogs and they're more forums One of the wiki sites that Mozilla's had for sometimes Mozilla dev center Or MDC, which is primarily developer targeted documentation on HTML JavaScript all that stuff It was originally running on media wiki last year They decided that they'd try transitioning to mind touch techie, which is a different wiki system Which actually long long ago forked from media wiki and then rewrote the entire thing So they do some interesting things some of which we really like some of which we think are kind of weird and bizarre But you know they have their plus and minuses and one of the cool things for instance that Mozilla wanted for the MDC was Integrating multiple languages better into a single site, which currently we you know, we don't super well do we mostly put them in separate sites But there are projects that we can do it also has WYSIWYG editing but They've actually ditched a wiki markup entirely and just go straight to HTML Which has advantages and disadvantages it makes the WYSIWYG process easier But if you actually have to do source editing It ends up being more difficult because now you're editing right HTML So I've seen you know pluses and minuses complaints and praise from people who Have been reacting to this change And definitely it's one of the things that we're going to want to investigate What's good about that? What can we learn from what can we adapt? What do we know that we don't want to do because people are having problems with it on other sites So in general we have you know all these separate separate little things things that we want to do people We want to talk to Just stuff that we want to have going on and we have all these different ways of communicating with people we have the wikis We have both a media wiki.org Which is primarily documentation, but there's also you know some person-to-person communication on it people ask for help People you know try to document weird little things that they do We have a bug tracker we're using bugzilla Bugzilla has some issues and that's kind of big and scary and and frightening But also does a lot of things So you know are there ways that we can improve the bug tracker system make it easier to use But still keep it very capable. We have a bunch of mailing lists that people can talk on we have our C forum Rc chat rooms we have unofficial help forums This is various blogs people are using you know Twitter and identica and such Of course, we have you know conferences, you know people actually come together such as right here lots of folks Hi, how's it going? awesome And of course, you know people will directly email or otherwise contact people Individually to work on some specific issue. Is that too much stuff? Is that not enough stuff? Do we need more channels? I don't know But what we do want to make sure that we do is that we have clear communication One of the kind of general problems that people have is you know, they kind of do their awesome project and Then no one really looks at it or maybe somebody looks at it, but they don't really quite comment on it So we want to make sure that stuff actually gets Review if somebody is you know wants to build something That's for Wikipedia or for one of our other sites need to make sure that they have a very clear go or no go Reaction on whether or not we'll accept it in the first place and then once they've actually produced it Whether or not it's acceptable as it is if there's something wrong with it We need to let them know exactly what's wrong with it and exactly what they need to change Otherwise people get very frustrated It gets Difficult to really you know Continue on when you're not getting the feedback when you're not seeing this activity cycle of your stuff actually getting into production And this is something that a lot of large software projects have seen Certainly I remember contributing a number of patches to Mozilla back in the day and Really having to you know constantly push and follow up with people to make sure that my patch got reviewed That it got implemented that it got put into production If there was anything wrong with it, you know, I needed to actually know what was wrong so I could fix it and it took a lot of effort and I recognize that Sometimes we're not as responsive as we wish we were and people really have to you know come after me constantly To you know me or Tim or one of the others to make sure that we actually review it and fix it and awesome stuff happens So we want to make sure that that process is easier to happen That we're not just dropping things on the floor And we need communications for that to happen So one open question is maybe we need a slightly more formal process in there Maybe we need to have you know some specific place that people can go and say I want to do This thing is it okay or not? Maybe something like the python extension proposal System that you know the python world's use You know is that good is that bad? I don't know But it's something we definitely want to be thinking about in addition, there's a problem of feature ideas or bug fixes or whatever that People really want but those people aren't coders And in the world of open source most of the time Whoever is actually doing the coding wins Because if there's something that people want, but they're not writing the software No one cares We want to make sure that those things that are important actually get it paid attention to now. We are Definitely trying to see a little more organization going on as far as conferences You know generally making sure that Everybody kind of knows what's going on and everybody has those lines of communication open. There's a meeting with he developer conference excellent developer conference going on let me in Berlin in April which let me pop up the URL to that Don't know if you can already get from here, but this is a small URL. Oops that didn't work Did I yeah type something wrong didn't I? Mw meet oh nine There we go So this is going to be Awesome awesome fun. It's going to be at the sea base in Berlin, which if you haven't been there sweet, I Highly recommend it So we're not only going to have a lot of fun, but we're also I think going to be very productive. We're going to have Hopefully most of our core developers from lewikimedia foundation as well as a bunch of the awesome awesome Volunteer developers throughout Europe and elsewhere Get together, you know knock some heads together knock some code out Make sure that we really get stuff happening So everybody come to it. It's going to rock And I think I had something else oops Now I have to find where I left it's about like two minutes left or something But I'm on like my last slide, so I think I'm pretty good So we're also looking at possibly doing another kind of hackfest near our main offices San Francisco Sometime maybe the summer later And we'll definitely be organizing Some tech stuff at the wiki mania conference, which is going to be in Buenos Aires, Argentina in August lots of crazy wiki stuff will be totally awesome and And The thing we need most is you So we just want to make sure that you know if there's something that you want in media wiki, and it's not there yet Keep bugging us. Don't forget. Don't think that we've forgotten you You know, we're just we're trying to get to everybody and we want to make sure that it happens So keep it up keep bugging us. You know keep beeping me on IRC. That's what we want and I don't think there's any time for well. We have one minute for questions So if there's anything really good That is an excellent question. It's trying to write an offline reader and has the problem that the grammar for the markup sucks. This is sad but true and hopefully we will find some way to improve that it is a long standing problem But definitely we are aware of it and there are a number of possible ways and we're going to make something happen on it Yes, and I guess that's about it. So thanks everybody for coming