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
We are a small team with limited resources, and balance our efforts across three categories:
When we say "no" to a given request, we are merely stating it goes against our current priorities.
When working and communicating with us:
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 |
|---|---|
| Multiple Watchlists |  In development |
| Multiblocks |  Done |
| Template recall and discovery | Done |
Hello everyone! We are happy to announce that we will deploy the new Community Wishlist extension on October 1! We hope this extension and the upcoming improvements will help you in submitting and translating your wishes to the Community Tech team, while also streamlining the influx of new wishes and navigation of the Wishlist.
The new extension comes with an updated intake form that will standardise the way wishes are categorised. We have introduced a concept called “tags”, which are keywords or phrases that associate a wish with a high-level concept. This essentially brings back the “Categories” that users may remember from the Community Wishlist Survey of years past. The older “Projects” field for wishes will be removed and replaced with tags.
As requested by the community in many instances, and as we already announced, it will be possible to support individual wishes again. This will help WMF teams prioritize their work when assigning a wish to a new or existing focus area, and choosing a new focus area to work on.
Another notable change is we will no longer be using the wish title as part of the page title. We’ve learned that wishes and their meanings can evolve, but moving pages to reflect the change in meaning isn’t particularly easy, and in some cases it is impossible. Instead, we will assign autogenerated IDs to each wish and focus area, i.e. W1, W2, W3, and FA1, FA2, FA3, etc. This is similar to how Phabricator and Wikidata work. This way, links to a particular wish or focus area are guaranteed to always be the same.
Browsing through wishes will now be done using pagination, as opposed to having all wishes listed on one long page. You will be able to sort by vote count, title, and creation date. The old system, which was powered by a bot, will be permanently retired. There will be a brief period of downtime while the extension is deployed and wishes are migrated to the new system.
Wishes will continue to be grouped and assigned, after review, to focus areas, by identifying the common themes across wishes. This will help teams to see if they can address related issues which could significantly improve your editing experience.
Within a week or two following deployment, we will add the ability to filter the existing wishes by status, tags and focus areas.
We hope this new extension will be welcomed by you, and we are interested in your feedback. This will be the first part of a series of new releases regarding the Wishlist, so stay tuned for other changes. Please do not hesitate to contact us inour talk page, and share with us your thoughts! We hope that you appreciate the changes we’re making based on your feedback, and that you want to continue being part of this process together with us.
Also, we remind you that we are collecting feedback around our next feature,Watchlist labels (formerly known as “Multiple watchlists”). We already have announced in the last update that we were looking for feedback regarding how watchlists and recent changes pages are used across projects, and we are still looking for input from you! In particular, we are interested in knowing how users would want to create multiple watchlists, and what each watchlist might be used for.
Thank you in advance for your help!
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