Wikimedia Feature Deployments and MediaWiki Development
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This project and project page are under active development. |
Overview and objectives[edit]
As the usage of open source software (OSS) as digital infrastructure grows, centralized organizations are increasingly responsible for these critical volunteer projects. The dynamics of library stewardship and maintenance vary project-by-project, with some steward organizations maintaining complete control of project development and others merely hosting servers. As these hybrid development models become more common, it is critical for researchers to study the minutia of how organizational processes and standards impact project maintenance and health. To those ends, we ask: how does the design of feature deployments impact power distribution within hybrid OSS projects?
This research project studies three feature deployments on Wikimedia platforms and their relationship to contributions to the features' underlying MediaWiki libraries. We studied VisualEditor, HTTPS-as-default, and HTTP-deprecation to examine how the organizational dynamics within OSS ecosystems change within these critical moments in project development. We hope that this research can provide useful insights surrounding the design of feature deployment processes for open digital infrastructure projects.
Project Team[edit]
- Darren Gergle (PI), Northwestern University
- Aaron Shaw (co-PI), Northwestern University
- Matt Gaughan (PhD student), Northwestern University (gaughan@u.northwestern.edu)
Resources[edit]
Code[edit]
Data[edit]
- Here is a link to a compressed tarball of our Phabricator and Commit data as of May 31, 2025 [3].
- Our Wikimedia user and bot activity data is derived from the Wikimedia dumps.
Presentations[edit]
- Gaughan, M., Shaw, A., Gergle, D. ``Theorizing the Relationship Between Wikimedia Feature Deployments and MediaWiki Software Engineering. WikiWorkshop 2025. May 21-22, 2025. Virtual. Extended Abstract
Acknowledgements[edit]
We would like to thank the members of the Wikimedia and MediaWiki communities who have made their records available to the public. We gratefully acknowledge the support of a grant from the Digital Infrastructure Insights Fund, fiscally supported by Aspiration. This work was conducted using the Hyak supercomputer at the University of Washington as well as research computing resources at Northwestern University.
