The document discusses the role of features engineering at Wikipedia, led by Terry Chay, emphasizing the importance of design patterns, responsive design, and user experience in software development. It highlights various challenges faced, including middle management issues and stagnant editor engagement, while also outlining strategies for improving Wikipedia's user interface and encouraging contributions. Additionally, the document underscores the Wikimedia Foundation's vision of freely sharing knowledge with the world, supported by data analysis and habit formation techniques to enhance user interaction.

1. Ten Evil Things
Features Engineering at Wikipedia
Terry Chay, Director of Features Engineering @ the Wikimedia Foundation
Sunday, August, 18th, 2013 @ 3:30 PM
Closing Keynote, Northeast PHP Conference 2013

2. Who Am I?

3. Teaching PHP & Web Development —
Larry Ullman
How To Get There — Larry Ullman

4. 3 Jobs
1.ZipAsia, 1999-2000
2.Qixo, 2001-2002
3.MyCasaNetwork,
2002-2004
4.Plaxo, 2004-2006
5.Tagged, 2007-2009
6.Automattic, 2009-2012
7.Wikimedia, 2012-current

5. Plaxo, 2004-2006

6. Tagged, 2007-2009

7. the Wikimedia Foundation, 2012-

8. Web Applications
Engineer (Plaxo)
Early Talks

9. Code Complete
Software as Construction as the chief
frame for software development

10. Software as
Construction
Do you believe you are like this?

11. Mythical Man-
Month
The myth is that people and time are
interchangeable: “Man-month” is a
concept from construction.

12. The final goal of any
engineering activity is some
type of documentation. When a
design effort is complete, the
design documentation is turned
over to the manufacturing team.
If the design documents truly
represent a complete design, the
manufacturing team can proceed
to build the product.
—Jack Reeves, C++ Journal, 1992

13. Correct Frame (Paradigm):
We are Engineers (not construction
workers)
The Source Code is the Design (not the
product)

14. Software Architect
(Tagged)
PHP without PHP

17. Don’t Be STUPID, Grasp SOLID —
Anthony Ferrara
UI Patterns: A Practical Toolkit — Jim
O’Neill

18. Gang of Four
Introduced Design Patterns to
Programming (a.k.a Object-Oriented
Design)

19. The Timeless Way
of Building
Defined “Design Patterns” for the
Gang of Four

20. Each pattern describes a problem
which occurs over and over
again in our environment and
then describes the core of the
solution to that problem, in such
a way that you can use this
solution a million times over,
without ever doing it the same
way twice.
—Christopher Alexander, A Timeless Way of
Building, 1979

21. Pattern
vocabulary (name the pattern)
solves a problem (“describes a problem…and the
core solution”)
not an algorithm (“million times over without ever
doing it the same way twice.”)
has consequences (“occurs…in our environment”)

22. Introduction to Laravel — Jonathan
Barronville

23. A Pattern
Language
Software Architects need to use the
same language as “real” architects.
That is the language of Design
Patterns.

24. Director??? of Features
Engineering
(Wikimedia Foundation)
10 Evil Things

25. #1 Middle Management
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Pointy-haired_Boss

26. Minions!

27. MY (NOT) EVIL MINIONS
+5
Visual Editor/Parsoid
Ori Livneh
Matt Flaschen
+1
Experimentation
+2
Editor Engagement
Fundraising Tech
+1

28. Clean Application Development — Adam
Culp
Agile in the Workplace — Michael Stowe
Designing software for the Agile
generation — Martin Kemp
How to hire a good engineers — Bryan
Healey

29. Minions!

30. How to win (over) minions and
influence coders

32. As Lakoff notes, "On the day
that George W. Bush took
office, the words "tax relief"
started coming out of the
White House."… Lakoff insists
that liberals must cease using
terms like… tax relief because
they are manufactured
specifically to allow the
possibilities of only certain
types of opinions. Tax relief for
example, implies explicitly that
taxes are an affliction,
something someone would
want "relief" from.
—Wikipedia, Framing (social sciences)

33. Somehow the combination
of tacit, culture-defined
agreements, and traditional
approaches to well-known
problems, insured even when
people were working
separately, they were
working together, sharing
the same principles. As a
result, no matter how
unique and individual the
pieces were, there was
always underlying order in
the whole.
—Christopher Alexander, The Oregon Experiment

34. "We've given you a recipe," Warren
told me. "We don't have to guide
you, because you're guiding
yourself. These habits become a
new self-identity, and, at that
point, we just need to support you
and get out of your way."…Warren
needed to teach people habits that
caused them to live faithfully not
because of their ties, but because
it's who they are. This is the third
aspect of how social habits drive
movements: For an idea to grow
beyond a community, it must become
self-propelling. And the surest way
to achieve that is to give people new
habits that help them figure out
where to go on their own.
—Charles Duhigg, The Power of Habit

35. In 17 of the 18 pairs of
companies in our research,
we found the visionary
company was guided more
by a core ideology—core
values and a sense of
purpose beyond just making
money—than the comparison
company was. A deeply held
core ideology gives a
company both a strong sense of
identity and a thread of
continuity that holds the
organization together in the
face of change.
—Jim Collins

36. Frames
Don’t Think of an Elephant!
George Lakoff

37. Core Values
Built to Last
Jim Collins

38. Habits
The Power of Habit
Charles Duhigg

39. Design Patterns
Timeless Way of Building
Christopher Alexander

40. Why do Features at Wikipedia?

41. nearly 500 million uniques!
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Europe
Asia Pacific
North-America
Latin-America
Middle-East/Africa
India
China
600 million
450 million
300 million
150 million

42. Scaling PHP to 40 Million Uniques—
Jonathan Klein
Using Innodb and Memcached Plugin —
Sheeri Cabral

43. Imagine a world in
which every single
human being can freely
share in the sum of all
knowledge.
Wikimedia Foundation Vision Statement
Core Value

44. Imagine a world in
which every single
human being can freely
share in the sum of all
knowledge.
Wikimedia Foundation Vision Statement

45. Numbers
7,000,000,000
2,200,000,000
500,000,000
80,000

46. We want Wikipedia to be
around for the long haul, the
long term, for our children’s
children. That’s why we need
a vibrant editing base
—Phoebe Ayers, Vice Chair, WMF Board of
Trustees

47. 0
15000
30000
45000
60000
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Active Editors
“Oh shit!” graph
- better data for 1 year
retention

48. #2 Heat Death

49. 0
15000
30000
45000
60000
2001 2002 2003 2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013
Active Editors 1 year retention
40%
30%
20%
10%
“Oh shit!” graph

50. better stacked chart
Pre 2007 made over half of all edits

51. “stability” stagnation & heat death
every single human being?

52. but being stagnant without
any data sucks. Even if staff
doesn’t want to be stagnant,
community wants to be
stagnant.
—former member, WMF Board of Trustees

53. Places in world that humans have
named
Based on data from the GeoNames database, >10 million entries.

54. Places in the world which have a
geographically tagged Wikipedia article.
Based on data extracted from 42 Wikipedia languages

55. builds to explain axes

56. What does Features Engineering do?

57. #3 Affordance

58. Don’t Make Me
Think
Introduced affordances to Web UI and
UX

59. Search

60. Bookmarking (Watchlists)

61. Non static

62. Ajax: You Can Do It Too — Larry Ullman
jQuery Mobile: Sites That Feel Like Apps
— Anna Filna
Team Plaatjes: Building JS Applications
with Vector Graphics

63. Numbers
7,000,000,000
2,200,000,000
500,000,000
80,000 0.016%

64. The Alpha Affordance

66. Testing UX Design with Reverse Card
Sorting — David Kelleher
Usability Testing for the Common Man —
Heather O’Neill
Honest Empathy — Heather O’Neill
watch Reid Hoffman’s
quote

67. Editing Wikipedia (pre-July 2013)

68. Today’s Affordance: WordPress
(TinyMCE) and Google Docs

69. & PARSOID
+5
Visual Editor/Parsoid
Ori Livneh
Matt Flaschen
+1
Experimentation
+2
Editor Engagement
Fundraising Tech
+1

71. VisualEditor considerations
support collaborative editing and playback
be easily extensible
support Turing complete templating languages
support for 270+ languages
not tied to MediaWiki or PHP (you can use this in
your project)
dirty diffs
Visual Editor
Data Model
ContentEditable
User Interface
HTML
+RDFa

72. Visual Editor
Data Model
ContentEditable
User Interface
HTML
+RDFa
Parsoid
Serializer
HTML
+RDFa
Wikitext
Parsoid

73. HTMLWikitext PHP Parser
PHP Parser

74. Parsoid
Serializer
HTML
+RDFa
Parsoid
Parsoid
Wikitext

75. How and use regular expressions in PHP
and why use them — Joel Lord
Coding the Semantic Web with HTML5 —
David Kelleher
Web Scraping with Node.io—Mark
Henderson

76. Adding Features to make it
easier to be more human
doesn’t turn [Wikipedia] into
Facebook, it just makes it more
like the rest of your life and I
think we should be doing that.
—Kat Walsh, Former Chairwoman of WMF
Board of Trustees

77. “Modernize” Design Affordance
freely share?

78. Introduction to User Experience (UX)
Design — Meghan Reilly
Layout on the Web — Brian Del Giudice
The UX of URLs—Ryan Freebern

79. #4 The Habit Loop
Cue
Routine
Reward

80. Alchoholism
Exercise
Social Gaming
Editing Wikipedia
Habits (Various Examples)
Cue
Routine
Reward

81. Not a (real) loop
Cue
Routine
Reward

82. Where to make the change?

83. #5Viral Growth

84. Understanding Virality
signup send e-mails read e-mail click link
new user

85. “viral growth” force multiplication

86. #6 Gameification

87. Gameification (Habit) Loop
Cue: See Wall
Post/Tweet
Routine: Click
on stuff
Reward: Brag on
social network
different user
Cue: See Wall
Post/Tweet
=
Routine: Click
on stuff
Reward: Brag on
social network

88. EDITOR ENGAGEMENT
+5
Visual Editor/Parsoid
Ori Livneh
Matt Flaschen
+1
Experimentation
+2
Editor Engagement
Fundraising Tech
+1

89. Echo & Flow
Cue
Routine
Reward
Friday, July 13, 12

90. Pragmatic API Development — Andrew
Curioso
Building a REST API — Michael Stowe

91. Echo (Notifications)

92. Increase criticism, decrease
praise
0
0.225
0.45
0.675
0.9
2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011
criticism
teaching
praise/thanks
warning

93. Notifications
Talk Page messages
Edit Revert
User Block
Page Review
Page Link
Mentions
Thanks
(Welcome)

94. Flow
(Discussion)

95. Rise of the Machines
0
10000
20000
30000
40000
2004 2005 2006 2007 2008 2009 2010 2011notool_total
twinkle_welcome
twinkle_warnings
twinkle_other
huggle
friendly
self
other_tool_total
cluebot
bot_other

96. Package Management in PHP: Better Late
than Never!

97. —Jimmy Wales, Founder of Wikipedia
Our tools are pushing us to
bad behaviors…[We should
be] identifying behaviors and
make sure the software gives
a pathway for making that
easy.

98. “gameification” habits

99. When to pull the lever?

100. #7Viral Marketing

101. #8 A-B Testing (Measurement)
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Soft_ruler.jpg

102. E3 (EDITOR ENGAGEMENT
EXPERIMENTATION)
+5
Visual Editor/Parsoid
Ori Livneh
Matt Flaschen
+1
Experimentation
+2
Editor Engagement
Fundraising Tech
+1

103. GuidedTours (Affordance)
Event Logging (Measurement)
ACUX (viral funnel)
Post Edit Feedback (Reward)
Onboarding (Cue)

105. Getting Started & Guided
Tour
0
25
50
75
100
% of total
Baseline
Getting Started Edit
Edit
To reverse the editor decline
would take between 1000-2000
additional active editors per
month
If this 2% activates at the same
rate as the baseline, this gets us
halfway there

106. Data-Driven

107. “data-driven” data-informed

108. FUNDRAISING ENGINEERING
+5
Visual Editor/Parsoid
Ori Livneh
Matt Flaschen
+1
Experimentation
+2
Editor Engagement
Fundraising Tech
+1

110. #9 Quantity vs. Quality
• Virality (People)
• Gameification (Time)
• Commercial (Money)
“Imagine a world in which every single
human being can freely share in the sum of
all knowledge.That's our commitment.”
“every single human being”
“freely share”
“sum of all knowledge”

111. “product-driven” consensus-oriented

112. …there are three disciplines
that go into product-based
founders: there is design,
product-management, and then
there is engineering. Ideally
you should have all three.
—Reid Hoffman, found of LinkedIn

113. Core disciplines
Product
Engineering
Design
Data
Community (for
Wikipedia)

114. Cracking the Code of Content
Development — Jason Rubin
You can UX Too: Avoiding the
Programmer’s User Interface — Eryn
O’Neill

115. #10 Responsive Design

116. Practical Responsive Web Design —
Jonathan Klein
Berserk for Responsive Design
Frameworks! — Jen Kramer
Up and Running with Twitter Bootstrap—
Jen Kramer
Mobile-First Design — Katelyn Sessions
watch Reid Hoffman’s
quote

117. “reactive” responsive

118. Who? (1) Middle Manager
Why? (2) Heat Death
What? (3) Affordance, (4) Habit
Loop (5) Viral Growth
Where? (6) Gameification, (7)
Viral Marketing
When? (8) A-B Testing (9)
Quantity/Quality (10)
Responsiveness
How? Create frames and use
them!

119. Victor’s Story

120. Invincible
not timid, bold
not policy, system
community not obstacle,
empowered
not automated or reactive,
responsive

121. Prescription
1. Find the things holding the organization back like a
bad habit
2. Do not directly fight against the frame (don’t think of
an elephant)
3. Instead look to the core values that form the
successful social agreements and name them
(patterns)
4. Instill the habits religiously to give people a sense of
purpose
5. Be consistent! Allow people to use them to be self-
directed and make it a self-propelling movement.

123. PHP: A Fractal of Bad Web Design

124. But I'm also here to tell you [it] doesn't matter.
The TIOBE community index I linked above? It's
written in PHP. Wikipedia, which is likely to be on the
first page of anything you search for these days?
Written in PHP. Digg, the social bookmarking service
so wildly popular that a front page link can crush the
beefiest of webservers? Written in PHP. WordPress,
arguably the most popular blogging solution available
at the moment? Written in PHP. YouTube, the most
widely known video sharing site on the internet?
[Originally] written in PHP. Facebook, the current
billion-dollar zombie-poking social networking
darling of venture capitalists everywhere? Written in
PHP.
Notice a pattern here?
— Jeff Atwood

125. Complaints
PHP is full of surprises:
mysql_real_escape_string, E_ALL
PHP is inconsistent: strpos, str_rot13
PHP is not concise: error-checking around C API
calls, ===
PHP is flaky: ==, foreach ($foo as &$bar)
PHP is opaque: no stack traces by default or for
fatals, complex error reporting
so is Javascript!
so is HTML/CSS!
so is Design!
so is producing
software!
so is the English
language!

126. Developing For the Cloud, In the Cloud —
David Duggins
Git Essentials — Matthew Barlocker
Preparing for Zend 5.3 Certification —
Peter MacIntyreMagic Methods: Spilling
the secret — Matthew Barlockercclean