Community Tech

Community Tech manages the Community Wishlist, a forum for contributors from all Wikimedia projects to suggest and comment on product and technology changes and improvements.

We leverage the Wishlist to collaborate with editors, volunteer developers, and other Wikimedia teams to turn community-identified needs into real solutions, and work on priority wishes.

✨ Make a Wish or support Wishlist ideas

The team

Mike Eztuinaga

Lead Technical Program Manager

Karolin Siebert

Engineering Manager

Cormac Parle

Principal Software Engineer

Dayllan Maza

Staff Software Engineer, Tech Lead

Tim Starling

Principal Software Architect

Joydeep Sengupta

Principal User Experience Designer

Harumi Monroy

Senior Software Engineer

MusikAnimal

Staff Software Engineer

Sam Wilson

Staff Software Engineer

Sammy Fox

Software Engineer

Dom Walden

Test Engineer

George Mikesell

Test Engineer

Luca Martinelli [Sannita]

Movement Communications Specialist

Ruth O'Donoghue

Senior UX Designer

🛠️ How We Work

We are a small team with limited resources, and balance our efforts across three categories:

Building tooling to advance the Community Wishlist
Maintenance of existing tools and features supported by the Community Tech team
Delivering on wishes, primarily by adopting Focus Areas supported by volunteers.

When we say "no" to a given request, we are merely stating it goes against our current priorities.

When working and communicating with us:

Please be calm, civil, and assume we’re working in good faith.
We aim to respond promptly but can't guarantee immediate replies.
Sometimes, we may need to close a conversation if it takes too much of our time or attention.
We can not handle projects on another team's roadmap or ones that conflict with their work, but we will direct you to the right person when possible.
We can not discuss staffing or confidential issues.

Current selected projects

Community Tech is currently wrapping up carry-over work from the 2023 Wishlist. Beginning in 2024-25, the team will adopt community-supported Focus Areas via the new Community Wishlist.

Projects	Project status
Multiple Watchlists	In development
Support full colour 3D models on Wikimedia projects	In development
Make the Chart extension beginner-friendly	In development

📢 Latest Updates

May 20, 2026: Community Tech becomes a program

Hello all, my name is Suman and I'm the Deputy Chief Product & Technology Officer at the Wikimedia Foundation. I'm writing to share with all of you that we've decided to do some internal restructuring about how WMF responds to and supports wishes. After noticing that having a centralized team was leading to frequent bottlenecks and delays as CommTech staff coordinated with other teams, we've decided to shift Community Tech into a program that multiple teams are officially responsible for supporting. This is a model that has proven success already, but it will involve disbanding the Community Tech team and the roles of five engineers and one manager. We still have dedicated staff managing the wishlist intake and triage process and will continue the same financial support for this work, just under a different structure.

Moving forward, the wishlist will continue to work on wishes from across languages and wikis, and complements many of the other channels where we regularly hear ideas and feedback from volunteers (talk pages, Village Pumps, chat platforms, calls, conferences, etc.) Our latest community update offers a detailed update about our progress over the last month, including completing a wish for tagging and tracking which pages users need to edit and adding new languages to “Who Wrote That” and the P&E Dashboard. In the coming weeks and months, we hope you all will continue to see an uptick in the speed and number of wishes we are able to address over time via our monthly statistics.

May 13, 2026: Latest updates from the Community Tech team

Hello everyone! It’s time to share with you an update of the work we’ve done in the last month, and what lies ahead in terms of what we’re going to work on.

The work we did in the last month

As part of the work on Watchlist labels, we closed another wish that was asking for tagging and tracking which pages users need to edit based on priority, interest levels, topics, and page improvement tasks. In addition, some of the required features of the wish were included in the newly deployed Personal Dashboard.

Also, we continued working on adding new languages to “Who Wrote That” and to the P&E Dashboard, with an additional 12 languages now available for those tools. There may be additional languages that will be available in the future.

Moreover, the Editing Team has been working on a wish related to a warning message when large amounts of content are being copy-pasted: a feature for this has now been deployed to all wikis and the team is currently asking for feedback about it.

Lastly, during the Wikimedia Hackathon in Milan, Katie Filbert worked on a patch to ensure to add a date range filter for MediaSearch. The patch is currently awaiting review.

What we currently have in progress

This is what we are currently focusing on this month:

Make the Chart extension beginner-friendly: we have finished some design mock-ups, which we have published on the new project page, and we started the technical implementation of the wish.
Support full colour 3D models on Wikimedia projects: 3D rendering has now been improved (scene lighting and normalising model scale, see this example). In addition, we have been investigating GLB support for 3d2png, exploring a new potential solution to the problem, after we found the initial attempt to not work. You can track progress on Phabricator at phab:T424872.
Add Wikipedia Mobile App’s Reading Lists to the Website: the feature has been deployed to all wikis on Beta only by the Reader team, which will be monitored to determine full production rollout.

What we are scoping next

Looking ahead, we already identified our priorities for the months to come:

Add the "hide templates" option to What links here page, a wish that already made top 6 in the 2022 Community Wishlist survey and that has quite some support in its resolution by users now, that focuses on removing articles from “What links here” page if included in a template, rather than included directly in the text.
Edit introduction instead of the entire article, a wish that asks for the possibility of editing only the incipit of an article, instead of opening the whole article in order to do it.
A way to see why a file is somewhere underneath a specific category (tool to show cat-path), a wish that asks for a functionality that shows the categorization path of the file to the parent category, so that one can spot the faulty categorization and fix it.
A proper audio player, a wish that calls for improving the current way for Wikimedia Commons to show and listen to audio files.
Allow sorting of discussions on talk pages, a wish already proposed in 2023, to help projects and pages that have non-standard sorting of discussions. Instead of forcing all users into one sorting order,, we can allow individual users to sort discussions chronologically in their preferred order, or even by “last modified”.

Some statistics

Here is a snapshot showing the breakdown of wish status over the past month:

Community Wishlist wishes count as of April 30, 2026

These numbers are regularly shifting due to new incoming wishes and more in depth review of wishes under review with stakeholders. The most notable shifts in numbers over the past month have been under review (down from 87 to 79), prioritised (up from 15 to 21) and long-term opportunity (up from 204 to 210).

Lastly, in April we reached a turnaround time of just under 3 business days for all new incoming wishes.

We need your feedback

As always, there are topics and areas for which we are seeking your feedback. In particular:

The Wikimedia Foundation’s 2026-2027 Annual Plan has been published, and six Key Results are relevant for recurring wishes. Join the talk page, which includes various prompts, authored collectively by the Product & Technology department.
- For example, see the discussion on newcomers, which is relevant for the popular Highlight edit button wish.
The draft we shared last month about how we triage and prioritise wishes to work on has now been published, and the page has been reorganised into sections due to the increased length.
As we enter the new financial year in July, we have started to think about refreshing Focus Areas and have posted some initial thoughts where you can participate.

As always, if you have questions or feedback about it, please let us know in the Community Wishlist’s talk page. We are eager to hear from you!

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