Editing Wikimedia Feature Deployments and MediaWiki Development (section)

== Overview and objectives ==

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.