Complexity

3 statements.

Author	Tags	Primary Session	Secondary Sessions	Position Statement
Derk-Jan Hartman	Complexity, Gadgets, Strategy, Tools, User Experience	Advancing the Contributor Experience	Evolving the MediaWiki Architecture	Growing and complexity Our strategy is pointing us towards a bold and inclusive world in terms of projects and people. Almost by definition this will lead to increased complexity, not simply of our technology, but also of how to deliver to and to enable people to make use of our technology. In the last few years we have spent energy in creating more api's and a more service oriented architecture. An area where we however have not made such major changes is how we design for and work with the front end of the software, which is where the majority of people are actually using all the other stuff we make. Here we continue to think in larger products and problems to solve, and quite often tend to fail and even clash with our own 'customers'. By taking on a more diverse strategy, we risk being even more vulnerable to this. I have two suggestions: Smaller engineering. Allowing more time for smaller projects, smaller bugs, smaller tests of ideas and refinement of existing software. Let's embrace the success of Community Wishlists and be closer to our communities by writing more Gadgets or tools (toolforge) when we can, instead of going for 'the big fix'. Have three 1 week tests instead of one 6 month beta. etc. Fix small bugs that annoy many and that make our website feel amateurish, and improve the experience for everyone. Working more often on the needs of smaller projects, giving them a bigger voice and sprucing up our own solutions by gaining a more diverse experience. Be closer to our communities by working nearer to them. The second point that we should work on, is to stop thinking of our platform as a website. It is a work environment for an increasingly diverse crowd. We have a limited amount of space on the screen and a huge amount of tasks that various people want to do. Gadgets and even more so userscripts are hugely helpful, but have long since become unmanageable. It is time to think beyond the simple APIs and widget kits. We need to take a step towards becoming an application environment. We need users to be able to install and use complete apps made from recognizable and reusable building blocks. I want to see and use Gadgets as my browser uses extensions. I want those extensions to put apps in recognizable and consistent spots, to allow for fullscreen or splitscreen views, to have a familiar UI, but without having to cram everything into the limited shared space that we have. Apps as gateways for diversifying the specific solutions we build.
Tim Starling	Architecture, Complexity, Refactoring	Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community		A key question for me is how we can maximise the richness of our feature offering despite having entered a period of slow growth in revenue and staff numbers. Wikimedia serves a very large number of users, with a diverse set of needs -- nobody can say that the site as it stands is sufficient to satisfy all of them. There are two main threats to our goal of providing a rich feature set. One is maintenance burden. We are faced with the prospect of sunsetting features because we find the maintenance burden to be too great. But there is no incontrovertible rule in software engineering which says that code, once written, must constantly be rewritten. Maintenance burden most commonly arises from changes in the platform on which the code is implemented. Minimising maintenance burden for a given feature set thus necessitates choosing a stable platform. We need to consider the programming languages we use, and the libraries we require, through this lens. The second threat is needless complexity. Concepts which are hard to understand, and which thus restrict related development to highly skilled developers, are appropriate only if hidden behind a module boundary. In order to enable contributions from developers less skilled than ourselves, and to minimise the time required for learning and familiarisation, the bulk of our code should be simple. Complexity is alluring because it provides developers the opportunity to take pride in their work. But for the benefit of the organisation as whole, its efficiency, and thus the richness of its product offering, we should introduce complexity only with due caution. Code which is complex but stable can be valuable, presenting no great risks. For example, the diff algorithm we currently use in wikidiff2 has its origin in Perl code written in approximately 1998. Only in the last year have we considered adding substantial features to it. We have a PHP port and a C++ port, and neither requires significant maintenance. This is because the requirements are stable and the two respective platforms (C++ and PHP) are stable. Contrast this to OCG, which is at risk of sunsetting only three years after its original deployment. The reason is that its input and output formats are constantly changing, that is, it has changing requirements; and it was written on a modern and rapidly changing platform. Its main developer wrote "the architecture which was state-of-the-art in 2014 is already looking a little dated in 2016". My goals for the developer summit are to encourage people to think carefully about writing code on top of a conceptually complex, rapidly changing platform. I want WMF and the MediaWiki community to write code which is stable and long-lasting, and can thus support a richly featured website into the future.
Madhumitha Viswanathan	API, Complexity, Documentation, Knowledge as a Service, Tools	Evolving the MediaWiki Architecture	Knowledge as a Service	We are in the business of democratizing knowledge, and I believe that lowering and removing technical barriers to entry, and creating a culture of inclusion in our technical spaces is essential to our success.' The Knowledge as a Service aspect of our strategic directions focuses on building infrastructure and platforms that help create and share open knowledge. The key to successfully building and scaling such infrastructure, in the context of the Wikimedia Technical spaces, is enabling everyone, irrespective of their experience or backgrounds to be able to utilize and create research, data, and tools on top of our infrastructure. When designing infrastructure and other technical products, we often fail to take into account technical barriers, inessential complexities and social costs that can discourage or prevent people from being able to leverage them. For instance, is it enough to build a dataset and store it in a database, if we do not provide friendly ways for researchers to access and analyze this data? Is it enough to put out a call to contribute to a project, but not provide easy-to-setup development environments to be able to test changes? Is it sufficient to have a state of the art environment to host applications, but not design good, simple processes around gaining access and deploying to them? These conversations are crucial, because we are not building products for technology's sake, but are in fact trying to build a culture where it is easy to use and contribute to our technical projects, whether you are a volunteer who has a few hours to spare or a paid employee; a newcomer or a long time contributor. We also want our technical communities to be diverse, and these complex systems and processes, and unsaid social constructs around how to interact with our projects, often bias against traditionally underrepresented populations in technology. I have always worked on or pushed for creating and supporting simple graphical interfaces that provide unified access to data sources, building platforms and processes that lets people just create tools/APIs/dashboards and be able to painlessly host them, developing tutorials and good documentation for getting involved in our projects, and codifying friendly and inclusive social norms and promoting a culture of being excellent to each other in our technical spaces. When talking about the future directions of new and existing projects, we should take into account the costs and barriers to access, and who we may be failing to include as a result. I hope to be this voice in the Developer Summit.