Share your product needs with the Community Wishlist

Have you ever wished for a new tool or feature that would make editing easier on the wikis? In order for Wikimedia’s projects to grow and thrive, volunteers need software that helps them write, cite, upload, and collaborate easily and across languages. Product teams at the Wikimedia Foundation build and maintain software throughout the year, and seek collaboration with volunteers to build, test, and deliver improvements. To support this collaboration, the Foundation has now re-opened one of our primary channels for technical suggestions and ideas: the Community Wishlist. 

The Community Wishlist is Wikimedia’s forum for volunteers to share ideas (called wishes) to improve how the wikis work. Unlike the previous iteration, the wishlist is always open, and volunteers can submit wishes in any language. Wishes should reflect product or technical challenges that volunteers encounter, and give space for developers, designers, and engineers to partner with users in building solutions together. Once a wish comes in, Wikimedia Foundation teams, volunteer developers, and Wikimedia affiliates will review open wishes and select areas to build on.

Volunteers can engage with the Community Wishlist on three levels: submit, vote, and build. 

1. Submit a Wish: The new Community Wishlist enables volunteers to share their wishes in both wikitext and the Visual Editor, and using their preferred language. Volunteers may also submit as many wishes as they’d like, at any time, but they must be logged into MetaWiki. Here’s how to get started:

• Navigate to the Community Wishlist home page and click “Submit Wish,” then complete the following required fields
  • Name: a name for your wish
  • Description: the problem you want to solve.
  • Type: a feature request, bug report, system change, or something else.
  • Project: Wiki projects associated with the wish.
  • Affected users: A description of users who’d benefit from the wish being solved
  • Users may optionally share a Phabricator ticket.
• Press Submit. That’s it!

2. Vote on Focus Areas: Wikimedia Foundation teams will review a new wish for relevance and completion and, if applicable, group it into a Focus Area, which represents a cluster of wishes with the same underlying problem. Focus Areas will be initially created by the Foundation, and volunteers may vote and comment on Focus Areas to signal opportunities in need of prioritization. 

Wikimedia Foundation teams will then adopt Focus Areas as part of the Annual Plan. This is an important change from the previous wishlist, while multiple Foundation teams worked to fulfill community wishes (see: Dark Mode, Edit Check), this wasn’t done consistently and at scale. Moving forward, the wishlist will serve as a central pipeline for surfacing community technical needs into Product & Technology annual planning, which is how major resourcing decisions are made. Starting in 2024-5, the Foundation has committed at least two teams (Community Tech and Moderator tooling) to examine the Wishlist, adopt, and address Focus Areas. As we evaluate community feedback on Focus Areas, additional teams may also adopt Focus Areas for this year. By 2025-2026, we anticipate even more wishes filtering into annual planning, with the acknowledgement that not every wish will be incorporated in a Focus Area, and not every wish or Focus Area will be worked on by the Foundation. 

We will be introducing our first set of Focus Areas at Wikimania, and invite volunteers to collaborate with us on future Focus Areas. 

3. Build technical solutions. The Foundation, affiliates, and technical stakeholders may adopt Focus Areas and continue to collaborate with contributors to further develop and build a new idea. 

The Community Wishlist is important to building a multi-generational movement; in order to build sustainable software, we need to hear from, and collaborate with volunteers about challenges and opportunities to improve our product and technology. Anyone in the movement can engage with Wishes, and collaborate with fellow volunteers and Wikimedia Foundation to build better software.

We’re so excited to reopen Community Wishlist with you, and can’t wait to see what problems and opportunities you have to share with each other.