- User Feed Me Your Skin agreed to re-publish an original guide on Wikimedia, which can be found on his personal blog, on The Signpost. This is being presented as a multi-part series of columns in this space over the next few issues. – Signpost Editors
As an online organization, The Wikimedia Foundation obviously makes heavy use of software and hardware. Unlike most organizations of its size, however, the foundation tries to document or open source as much of the technology as possible. While maybe not for everybody, looking at the technology behind Wikimedia can be interesting enough that I decided to give it its own section.
Wikitech
As a foundation that runs one of the largest websites in the world, it's not a surprise that Wikimedia has a very complex tech stack, which is totally documented on Wikitech. To be totally blunt, there's parts of this that I just don't understand. I'm only going to look at the parts that I actually understand and think is noteworthy, but Wikitech has way more detail about everything that I'm going to write and not write about in this section.
Grafana
To monitor the health of the Wikimedia infrastructure, Wikimedia has 100s of publicly available dashboards at Grafana. Some of these dashboards link to documentation about what the metrics mean, but others don't. Of course, you probably aren't going to spend much time looking at these dashboards unless you already understand this stuff.
Open Source
Whenever possible, Wikimedia uses free and open source (FOSS) software, which anybody can contribute to. Some of the code is hosted on Gitlab or Github, but most of it is hosted on Gerrit. Once you get a developer account to get access to Gerrit, there's tons of different projects that you can work on. Information about contributing to the infrastructure can be found directly on Wikitech, while information about the other projects can be found on the Wikimedia Developer Portal.
Phabricator
On top of the Git host, most software projects will have an associated Phabricator page. This is used for managing work, but people who don't develop can also use it to report bugs, issues, or to request features. It's somewhat analogous to the issue page for a Github project.
Cloud Services
Yup, Wikimedia has its own cloud computing platform, which is for developers who wanted to create programs to improve the projects. To provide hosting, the Wikimedia Foundation offers a cloud service called Toolforge. True to Wikimedia form, anybody can make an account and start writing their own tools, as long as they follow a fairly basic set of rules. However, this is far from the only cloud service offered by Wikimedia. There's also PAWS, which hosts Jupyter notebooks for analysis of Wikimedia projects and small bots, Cloud VPS, which is similar to Toolforge but is an Infrastructure as a service solution instead of a Platform as a service solution, and Quarry, a web interface to run SQL queries against Wikimedia projects. There's also Superset, which is also a web interface for SQL queries, but with the additional benefit of being able to create dashboards.
Data Dumps
We tend to take it for granted that the Wikimedia projects are always up and accessible. However, that isn't true for everybody. Some countries have censorship laws that prevent citizens from using these websites, while other people have unreliable internet that makes it impossible to access any website whenever you want. Thankfully, the Wikimedia Foundation dumps every single project every 2 weeks, as well as various statistics. Not only can you download the contents of these websites, you can also download the revision history and statistics as well. This also makes it good for research and archival in the unlikely event that Wikimedia goes down. These dumps can't be read directly, but they can be read with FOSS tools such as Kiwix.
I already mentioned that the Wikimedia projects are run using a piece of software called Mediawiki, but I never actually explained what that is. Mediawiki is a free and open-source software (FOSS) system that was developed in 2002 to better run Wikipedia after the pre-existing software was found to be too limiting. Knowing how to use Mediawiki well can massively change your user experience in ways that you wouldn't expect from how old-fashioned the UI looks. It also comes with an API that can be used to scrape Wikimedia pages.
How It Works
MediaWiki is essentially a no-code solution to modify a website. Instead of using HTML, it lets you write in plain-text and has built-in functionality to let you link to different pages on the website. Specifically, it uses a markup language called wikitext, which ironically doesn't necessarily have to be text (a change made to accommodate Wikidata). All changes made to a page are recorded in a public revision log, which can be used to revert bad edits.
Extensions
There's no such thing as a one-size-fits-all solution. Very often, users or admins will want to customize the UX for MediaWiki to either fit their own needs or the needs of the community. For that, you usually turn to extensions, which range from mere cosmetic changes to adding new functionality.
Templates
Templates are pages designed to be included in other pages. This is useful for when you need to frequently repeat an action while editing a project.
Namespaces
Namespaces are groups of pages, which are all connected by their name. When using a Wikimedia project, the pages that you're going to look at the most are the ones that make up mainspace, which is the name space dedicated for whatever the project is actually about. However, there's usually also a namespace for all the user pages, a namespace for discussion about the articles in mainspace, and a namespace for templates. As a general rule of thumb, you'll have to do a lot of searching to truly become acquainted with all the namespaces that a project has to offer.
User rights
An important feature of Mediawiki is user rights, which restricts or grants rights to certain groups. Mediawiki allows for admins to create groups and assign them rights, but there are also groups that are created by default. The 2 big ones are the admin and bureaucrat groups. Like the name implies, users assigned to the admin groups, well, administrate the website. They modify the CSS, ban malicious users, and do whatever else is needed to keep the community functioning properly. The bureaucrats are similar to the admins, except they can add or remove anybody from any group, including the admins.
The Other Stuff
There are many aspects to the movement that are deeply important, but not part of the main projects whatsoever. Some of those things will be given their own section, but this part of the blog post will exclusively deal with the miscellaneous stuff that doesn't neatly fit in any other category.
This is the wiki for the movement as a whole, rather than any individual project. Here, you can find details about what Wikimedia is doing, how it's doing it, and what it plans to do in the future. This is also a good place to find events and documents explaining various initiatives that Wikimedia has tried or are currently ongoing. While contributing to this wiki might seem harder than the official projects, Metawiki is always looking for volunteers to help translate content. There's always a lot that needs to be translated, even for common languages, so it's a good entry point for bilingual people who want to help out the movement. Alternatively, if you're the kind of person who's better with computer languages than human languages, you can also volunteer to provide tech support to the various communities that make up Wikimedia.
Stewards
These are the admins of admins. They can access any public Wikimedia project and change the user rights of anybody. The idea is that they can serve as admins to projects that have yet to appoint their own admins and to act in emergencies where the proper admin is incapacitated or too slow to act. There's annual elections, but only admins who have at least 600 edits on one project and 50 edits made in the last month can run. Similar editing requirements also apply to anybody who wants to vote, but you don't need to be an admin. To be elected, candidates must receive at least 30 supporting votes, and at least 80% of the votes must be supporting.
Most Wikimedia projects have different language versions. Rather than go through the effort of making a version that nobody ends up using, potential new versions are instead prototyped on Wikimedia Incubator. From there, the community can contact a group called the Language Committee for approval to become a new project. In true Wikimedia fashion, anybody can create a new language version of any project besides Wikidata, which is language-agnostic, Wikifunctions, also language-agnostic, Wikiversity, which hosts new language versions on Beta Wikiversity, and Wikisource, which hosts new language versions on the multilingual section of the website. The languages that get prototyped depend on the project. Wikipedia has already covered all the major languages, so all that's left is languages that just barely have enough speakers to justify a new language version. Meanwhile, the less popular projects often have major gaps, particularly Wikivoyage, which has major languages like Indonesian and Czech stuck in the incubator.
The Project Proposal Process
The Wikimedia projects are created through a proposal process. People interested in creating a new project propose it for the community to debate on, create a demo, and hopefully get proper recognition. Similarly, Wikimedia projects that seem to be dead can be removed by the community if someone proposes to delete it.
Wikispore
Wikispore is an experimental project where people can create their own miniwiki centred around particular topics like art or biographies. This makes it similar to Fandom, but without the ads or bloat. Because Wikispore is a collection of separate wikis, searching for things can be hard. However, it has a small but decently sized community, and by far the top contender to become a new Wikimedia project.
Research
At this point, I've hoped that I've convinced you that the Wikimedia movement is massive. Because of its scope, there's a lot of potential for research about online sociology, data science, and natural language processing. As part of this, Wikimedia has a dedicated page where researchers can publish the work that they've done or are in the process of doing. A fairly large number of these projects are commissioned by the Wikimedia Foundation itself in order to create products and improve the user experience, which offers an exciting insight into what Wikimedia projects might look like in the coming years. There's a monthly newsletter if you want to receive regular updates about the research that goes on (this newsletter is also published as a section in The Signpost).
Outreach Programs
People have different interests, which means that the level of information you can get about certain topics can vary widely. Because of this, there's occasionally campaigns to encourage efforts to edit articles in underrepresented areas and programs to help teach people not used to Wikimedia how to participate. These campaigns and programs can be found at the Outreach Dashboard, which also contains information on how to create and run a campaign or program of your own. These campaigns will openly publish metrics about their impact and level of participation, which is helpful for seeing if your campaign is the worth the effort it took to run it. Some of these campaigns have prizes, so it's definitely worth looking through and seeing if there's one that you find interesting.
WikiEducation
Despite what your middle school English teacher might have said, Wikipedia is actually a pretty decent source of information. More importantly, if you're in the 3rd world, you might not have access to more traditional forms of information like books. To that end, the Wikimedia Foundation has been putting a lot of effort into promoting the use of Wikipedia (and the other projects) in educational settings. As part of its commitment to transparency, the programs funded by Wikimedia are publicly listed alongside their goals and the institutions running them. The flagship program is Reading Wikipedia in the Classroom, which teaches teachers on how to use Wikipedia as an educational resource. A pilot program that educated 7000 teachers in the Philippines, Bolivia, and Morocco found that the program drastically improved teachers's view of Wikipedia and their willingness to use it in the classroom. This program has only been done in 7 countries, all of them 3rd world, but the training material can be freely accessed and used by everybody.
A very closely related initiative is the Wiki Education Foundation, an organization created by the Wikimedia Foundation in 2013 in order to handle the pre-existing Wikipedia Education Program. The Wiki Education Foundation has programs for universities to assign Wikipedia writing assignments, to teach researchers about how to use Wikipedia, and for institutions to develop an initiative to add their specialized knowledge to Wikipedia.
Finally, there's WikiLearn, an initiative by and for Wikimedia users to learn about leadership within the community, such as teaching grant recipients how to run a program safely or to help onboard people who are considering whether or not they want to run for a seat on the WMF Board of Trustees. This is done by offering courses that can be used by anybody for free, even if the course is only meant for a niche audience. The courses are currently only made by staff and trusted affiliates, but once a governance model is made for WikiLearn, there's plans to let everybody create courses.
Meetups
People like community, and while most Wikimedia communities are obviously online, there's still an appetite for meeting people IRL. The most prominent Wikimedia meetup by far is Wikimania, an annual conference where editors and interested parties can learn and discuss about various issues surrounding the projects. However, this is far from the only way to meet other editors IRL. There's tons of meetups happening in major cities around the world, which you can find at a dedicated Wikipedia page, and if there isn't one near you, you can always start your own.
GLaM
This is a movement to work with Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums in order to provide content for the Wikimedia projects. This is often done by having these institutions appoint a Wikipedian in Residence to write articles, but they can also integrate Wikimedia content into the institutions themselves, like by pairing exhibits with QR codes that link to relevant Wikipedia articles. The people behind GLAM maintain their own outreach page for people who want to contribute and have a monthly newsletter for people who want to monitor the progress of this movement.
Next issue: Part 3, The Wikimedia Foundation and The Other Groups
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