Research:WikiMedia Feature Deployment Impact on User Bot and Scripts
This page documents a research project in progress.
Information may be incomplete and change as the project progresses.
Please contact the project lead before formally citing or reusing results from this page.
This project aims to analyze the impact of large WikiMedia feature deployments on user bots and scripts. By comparing multiple cases of feature roll-outs, we hope to better understand the relationships between feature deployment procedure, roll-out outcomes, and subsequent software development. For deployment outcomes, we are specifically interested in feature impacts to user bot and script activity and any subsequent upstream software development activity.
At present, we are planning to study the feature deployments of VisualEditor, RESTBase, and the ongoing roll-out of Parsoid. We are specifically interested in how and when stakeholders were consulted, roadmaps were published, and decisions were made during the development of these features.
Methods
editWe will study these feature deployments by collecting a novel set of preexisting multi-modal data. Our data will include discussions on feature deployment RFCs, project commit histories, and WikiMedia Foundation activity dumps.
Timeline
edit- November 2024: Project start
- January 2025: Data collection
- February 2025: Initial Analysis
- March 2025: Preliminary Results
Results
editWe will make our code, data, and results publicly available as we progress through this research study. Similarly, this Meta-Wiki research page will be updated as we progress through this project.