Commons talk:WMF support for Commons

This is the talk page for discussing improvements to Commons:WMF support for Commons.
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Annual plan 2024-2025 discussions regarding Wikimedia Commons

These are some relevant conversations regarding Wikimedia Commons and the 2024-2025 annual plan that might be of interest to followers of this page:

Thanks. - Fuzheado (talk) 17:38, 3 June 2024 (UTC)

Wikimania 2024

Are there people from the team at the Wikimania? I would be interested to have some small meetup with other users and the development team on the project. GPSLeo (talk) 18:25, 29 July 2024 (UTC)

@GPSLeo Yes, CParle (WMF) and I will be there from the Structured Content team. We're definitely up for a meeting, and I guess we can save up a place for a meetup or just hang out at a coffee break. Just to be sure, are you on Telegram? You can find me at @Sannita, it's gonna be easier for me to keep contact with you once there. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 09:25, 30 July 2024 (UTC)
I think the rooms for meetups are already all blocked by other groups but we should be able to find some place. Maybe we can look for a time and then see how many people are interested. Yes, I can contact you on Telegram. GPSLeo (talk) 19:14, 30 July 2024 (UTC)

Maintainer of cross-wiki upload tool

Who is maintaining mw:Upload dialog (cross-wiki upload feature/tool), in terms of software development and product management? I would like to document it at Commons:Cross-wiki media upload tool but I couldn't find the current information. It looks like it was the Multimedia team according to mw:Reading/Multimedia years ago. whym (talk) 11:21, 6 September 2024 (UTC)

@Whym: It appears that no one is maintaining it, which is why it is left to spew mostly garbage on our doorstep.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 11:25, 6 September 2024 (UTC)
A WMF team previously owned the feature, before the team ceased to exist. Is there no internal documentation on what happened to the feature afterwards (transferred, abandoned, etc)? I would expect such documentation to be part of an internal reorganization effort. whym (talk) 10:04, 19 September 2024 (UTC)
@Sannita (WMF) Is this something you can help with? whym (talk) 12:34, 4 October 2024 (UTC)
@Whym I can investigate which team is working on it, but I don't know if there is one any more. I'll keep you posted. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 18:19, 4 October 2024 (UTC)
I'd appreciate if you can help clarifying the situation, thanks. whym (talk) 12:12, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
I did some investigation, and it seems it is no longer owned by any team at WMF. There was a team, but due to internal reorganisation, it now focuses on different things. Sannita (WMF) (talk) 13:36, 10 October 2024 (UTC)
Thanks. I briefly mentioned the lack of ownership in the tool page. whym (talk) 09:38, 18 October 2024 (UTC)
FWIW - this is actually a pretty common occurance at WMF. As an example, who owns file rendering? Who owns file management in mediawiki (aka File & FileBackend class hierarchy, not including Swift which is SRE owned). The answer is basically nobody. Bawolff (talk) 02:03, 9 November 2024 (UTC)
@Bawolff: File rendering actually works.   — 🇺🇦Jeff G. ツ please ping or talk to me🇺🇦 02:59, 9 November 2024 (UTC)
I realize many MediaWiki features for Wikimedia projects have no owners. But do teams abandon features that they own without announcement? Is that routinely done? I would expect to hear something like "we are undeploying this because we cannot support it any more" or "we will end our support but it is usually maintenance-free - we hope someone else can lend a hand when maintenance is necessary". whym (talk) 09:37, 30 November 2024 (UTC)
Yes, this happens all the time. New projects take up the time, people leave the organization, reorganizations make entire teams disappear. The older projects then go into "we will fix it if it really breaks" mode. This doesn't mean completely unmaintained. Many changes are regularly needed across almost all code to keep things working and this keeps happening (horizontal work vs vertical work). Similarly the security team will look at projects if there are concerns about security). But bugfixing and new feature development tends to stall.
At that point it is essentially up to individuals (volunteer or employed by WMF) to look at something every once in a while and keep it 'alive'. I would say that about 60% to 80% of the sourcecode/projects are in this state at any point in time (and it's worse for the toolforge projects). If the project is particularly on the fringes of people's knowledge, skills or the fringes of the projects itself and it doesn't get much attention for a while, this naturally tends to result in bitrot, being stuck in the past etc. The more complex the project, the higher the likelyhood that it has to be dropped and or completely rewritten after a couple of years. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 12:15, 30 November 2024 (UTC)

Why is this page still difficult to find?

In the discussion linked above I proposed to an additional to the village pump navigational template, to quote myself:

"At the English-language Wikipedia there is the WMF village pump, in fact the Wikimedia Commons largely mirrors the English-language Wikipedia's village pumps (Policy village pump → Copyright ©️ village pump (as most of our policies essentially are about the enforcement of copyright laws), Technical village pump → Technical village pump → Idea lab → Idea lab, Proposals village pump → Proposals village pump, and Miscellaneous village pump → Miscellaneous village pump), except for the fact that we don't have a WMF village pump. Perhaps a WMF village pump could be used as a central hub for communicating developments and getting community feedback. "

& (and)

"Per this comment, I'd like to suggest increasing the visibility of this page. There is currently a list above the village pump which displays as:

  • Community portal
    • introduction
    • Help desk
  • Village pump
    • copyright
    • proposals
    • technical
  • Administrators' noticeboard
    • vandalism
    • user problems
    • blocks and protections

I think that it might be wise to add:

  • WMF support
    • Centralised discussion (this could be done by creating a separate page akin to the WMF village pump of Enwiki and keep this page's main page as the navigation 🧭 hub, and this talk page the talk page for the navigation hub.
    • Structured data (as this is also a WMF project).
    • WikiLegal "

So, basically I am proposing to add:

To this template, as these are all relevant community pages that deserve a wider audience.

Assuming that this page is "the central discussion avenue" for communications with the Wikimedia Foundation (WMF) at the Wikimedia Commons outside of specific projects. I'm not proposing for the Foundation to start posting announcements or anything at this talk page, simply make it more visible and easy to find for other users by adding this next to the village pumps, administrators' noticeboards, and help pages. --Donald Trung 『徵國單』 (No Fake News 💬) (WikiProject Numismatics 💴) (Articles 📚) 21:02, 1 December 2024 (UTC)

Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2025-2026/Product & Technology OKRs

Just FYI that there m:Wikimedia Foundation Annual Plan/2025-2026/Product & Technology OKRs open --Zache (talk) 10:00, 7 March 2025 (UTC)