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Design

From mediawiki.org

Statement of Purpose

Design at Wikimedia Foundation makes sharing of all human knowledge easy and joyful. For everyone.

The Foundation Product Design team's goal is to ensure that Wikimedia products and communications follow a design process centered on the user. Based on research to understand people’s needs and motivations, we explore solutions that meet those needs.

We design in the open with a transparent and participatory process. We collaborate within the Wikimedia Foundation and with the global community of contributors. We create well-designed solutions, together.

Read more about the background for this statement of purpose.

About the team

The product design and design research team has over 500 years of combined user experience design and research, engineering, information architecture, HCI, visual design, and usability experience.

Product Design

Design Research

The Product Design team works closely with Design Research (also known as Design Strategy). More info on their team page here.

Process

How to get involved and work with us

We welcome help in many ways, but we have limited time and have priorities based on the Foundation's roadmap to focus on. We want to make sure we foster an environment where community designers can contribute to the projects as well as developers.

A few ways to help out by volunteering your time:

  • Review, create or contribute to Phabricator design tasks with one of the following tags:
    • Design – for issues or requests related to design in Wikimedia movement projects
    • Design-Research – for design research requests
    • Codex – Design System for Wikimedia including our default user interface library based on Vue.js (intended to eventually replace OOUI)
      • Wikimedia-Design-Style-Guide, the predecessor of Codex
      • OOUI – our former default user interface library (2015-2022, maintained and improved, but without new feature development)
    • Accessibility – for all tasks that are meant to make our interface more accessible and inclusive
    • MediaWiki-Interface
  • Learn about the Wikimedia design principles and how to give design feedback


Projects

Product teams

Many (but not all) of our cross-disciplinary product teams have a UX designer embedded into the team, where they focus on the User Experience (UX) for the team. Here's a list of the teams in which designers are currently working.

Team Description Designer Area of focus
Web The Web Team focuses on the reading experience. Justin Scherer Consumers

area managed by:Carolyn Li-Madeo

Android The Android team focuses on building inclusive mobile-first experiences, equitably filling knowledge gaps and increasing quality contributions to Wikipedia. Sarah Chekfa
iOS The iOS team focuses on building mobile first inclusive, consistent, and permeable features to make editing, reading, and participating on Wikipedia intuitive for iOS app users. Robin Schoenbaechler
Editing The Editing team work on products for editing—generally across MediaWiki, and the suite of editors including VisualEditor, as well as initiatives that facilitate more productive contributions (such as On-wiki collaboration and Edit Check). Nicolas Ayoub Contributors

area managed by Nicolas Ayoub, with Amin Al Hazwani

Growth The Growth team focuses on features to encourage activation and retention of new editors on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Julieta Fernandez
Moderator Tools The Moderator Tools team focuses on content moderation needs and processes, including page protection, deletion, reporting, and recent changes patrolling. Olga Tichonova
Campaigns The Campaigns Team is focused on building tools to help campaign and event organizers effectively engage participants as successful editors and retain them as contributors on Wikimedia projects. Gregory Onyeahialam
Language and Product Localization The Language and Product Localization team focuses on reducing barriers to access and share knowledge. Main focus is to reduce knowledge gaps across languages with content and section translation. This team was created as the union of the former Inuka and Language teams. Pau Giner and Sudhanshu Gautam Languages & Content Growth

area managed by Pau Giner

Abstract Wikipedia The Abstract Wikipedia Team is focused on building Wikifunctions and Abstract Wikipedia, both efforts towards a multilingual Wikipedia where more people can share more knowledge in more languages. Amin Al Hazwani
Design System The Design System team focuses on creating, maintaining and improving the Wikimedia Design System that provides the building blocks for everything we do. BĂĄrbara MartĂ­nez,

Derek Torsani

Platforms

area managed by Matthew Williams

Structured Content The Structured Data Across Wikimedia team is focused on structuring content on wikitext pages in a way that will be machine-recognizable and relatable, to make reading, editing, and searching easier and more accessible across projects and on the Internet. Sneha Patel
MediaWiki & Data Platform Engineering teams The MediaWiki Engineering Group specializes in working with MediaWiki and various parts of its core software, whilst the Data Platform Engineering team comprises data teams and systems from across the Product and Technology department with a goal to deliver end-to-end data capabilities for data producers and consumers. Sarai Sanchez
Trust and Safety Product The Trust and Safety Product team focuses on features to increase digital, and physical safety on Wikipedia and other Wikimedia projects. Katie Coleman, Joydeep Sengupta Trust and Safety

area managed by Katie Coleman

Community Tech The Community Tech Team is focused on equity and community impact, building and improving curation and moderation tools crowdsourced from experienced users through the Community Wishlist Survey. Joydeep Sengupta (FOTW project), Wishes design support on a by-project basis Community Tech

Managed by Joydeep Sengupta

Design resources

Our resources for majority of our work are public and in open source projects. Have a look at the Wikimedia Design Style Guide (on Github) and its Resources section.
When designing with us bear in mind our Design best practices.

All our graphics assets are licensed under open licenses (but note that many of the logos are trademarked). All our user interface development is public in open source projects.

Reach out or stay up-to-date

Archived, obsolete resources

For historical context:

Design Fellow Alumni