PDF version of slides from Opening Keynote at PHP|tek 2014

1. Frames:
Inside the Challenges at Wikipedia
Terry Chay, Director of Features Engineering @ Wikimedia
Foundation
!
Opening Keynote, php[tek] 2014
2014-05-21 09:00-10:00 CDT

2. Frames:
Inside the Challenges at Wikipedia

3. Who am I?
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Wiki-ah-thu-_MG_8382-0203.jpg

4. How did I get here?

5. A long time ago,
in a startup far, far
away, I was a PHP
programmer…

6. Then this
happened…
Then Zend made this deck
of cards…

7. Not quite
unlike…

8. …and…
other playing cards
(preceded and followed)

9. PHP Terrorist

10. Director of Features Engineering
at the Wikimedia Foundation

11. • PHP 5.6 and beyond — Adam Harvey (Wed 10:30a)
• Becoming a GoPHPer — Paddy Foran (Wed 3:30p)
• JavaScript’s Difficult Concepts — Jeff Carouth (Wed 5p)
• Contributing to Core — Ben Ramsey (Wed 5p)
• Threading in PHP — Stefan Willkommer (Wed 5p)
• Modern PHP — Ben Ramsey (Thr 10:30a)
• Async PHP with React — Jeremy Mikola (Thr 10:30a)
• Obtaining Closure with Anonymous Functions — Andy Casell (Thr noon)
• Recursion: Making Big Problem's Smaller — Jeremy Lindblom (Thr noon)
• Functional PHP — Larry Garfield (Thr 2p)
Programming Language(s)

12. Director of Features Engineering
at the Wikimedia Foundation

13. What is the Wikimedia Foundation?

14. Half a billlion visitors
0
150000000
300000000
450000000
600000000
2008 2009 2010 2011 2012 2013 2014

15. Frames
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frames_for_sale.JPG

16. • How to Hack Conversations — Greg Baugues (Wed noon)
• How to Get There — Larry Ullman (Thr 9a)
• Adventures in Contract Development — Tim Lytle (Thr noon)
• How To Be A Great Developer —Edward Finkler (Thr 2p)
• Working with difficult people — Laura Thomson (Thr 3:30p)
• Practical Software Estimation — Chuck Reeves (Thr 5p)
• Git and Github: Working Effectively on a Team — Jeff Carouth (Fri 10:30a)
Development (process, personal, team)

17. Frames
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frames_for_sale.JPG

18. What are Frames?
As Lakoff notes, "On the day that George W.
Bush took office, the words "tax relief"
started coming out of the White House."…
Lakoff insists that liberals must cease using
terms like… tax relief because they are
manufactured specifically to allow the
possibilities of only certain types of opinions.
Tax relief for example, implies explicitly that
taxes are an affliction, something someone
would want "relief" from.
—Wikipedia, Framing (social sciences)

19. FRAME: Core Values
In 17 of the 18 pairs of companies in our
research, we found the visionary company
was guided more by a core ideology—core
values and a sense of purpose beyond
just making money—than the comparison
company was. A deeply held core ideology
gives a company both a strong sense of
identity and a thread of continuity that holds
the organization together in the face of
change.
—Jim Collins

20. What is your organizations core
values?

21. Wikimedia Foundation Vision Statement
Imagine a world in which every
single human being can freely share
in the sum of all knowledge.

22. Features Engineering

23. • Advanced Date/Time Handling with PHP — Derick Rethans (Wed 10:30a)
• Grokking Regex — David Stockton (Wed 3:30p)
• Shell Revolution — Christopher Stone (Fri 10:30a)
Language “Features”

24. Features Engineering

25. This is about my minions!

26. Pair programming

27. MINIONS:
VisualEditor
+ Timo Tijhof
+ Alex Monk
+ (hiring)
Trevor Parscal Roan Kattouw
Ed Sanders Moriel Schottlender
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors

28. Let’s talk UI/UX
It’s the language of the Internet

29. • No Modes — Andy Cassell (Thr 3:30p)
• Avoiding the Programmer's Interface — Eryn O'Neil (Thr 10:30a)
UI and UX

30. Let’s talk UI/UX
It’s the language of the Internet

31. FRAME: Affordance
Affordances are qualities that enable discovering
actions without thinking.
—Wikipedia, Affordance

32. FRAME: Affordance
Affordances are qualities that
enable discovering actions
without thinking.
!
—Wikipedia, Affordance

34. The Visual Editor as the Alpha
Affordance

35. Editing in “source” Mode (Wikitext)

36. Editing in the VisualEditor

37. MINIONS:
Parsoid Team
Subbu Sastry
C Scott Ananian Marc Ordinas i Llopis Arlo Breault
Matthew Flaschen
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors

38. PHP Parser
HTMLWikitext PHP Parser

39. HTMLWikitext PHP ParserParsoid
PHP Parser
Parsoid
Serializer

40. • Accelerating Web Applications with Varnish — Samatha Quinones (Wed 10:30a)
• Static Sites with Sculpin — Beau Simensen (Thr noon)
• HHVM in 2014 — Elizabeth Smith (Thr 3:30p)
• Grocking Browser Performance — Josh Holmes (Thr 5p)
• Scaling PHP in the real world! —Dustin Whittle (Fri 10:30a)
Performance and Scaling

41. HTMLParsoid
PHP Parser
Wikitext
Parsoid
Serializer

45. MINIONS:
Growth
Matthew Flaschen
Rob Moen Sam Smith Andrew Russell Green
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors

46. 0
15000
30000
45000
60000
2001 2006 2011
EnWiki Active Editors 2001-2007

47. 0
15000
30000
45000
60000
2001 2006 2011
Frame: Hockey Stick (growth)

48. Viral Growth
signup send e-mails read e-mail click link
new user

49. Viral Growth
signup send e-mails read e-mail click link
new user
v = ∏(dropoffs) *
(size of address book)

50. v≥1v<1

51. Smiley Story
:-)

52. Smiley Story
:-(

53. A-B Testing

54. • Why You Can't Test — Chris Hartjes (Wed 3:30p)
• Mocking Dependencies in PHPUnit — Matt Frost (Fri 9a)
Testing

55. A-B Testing

56. A-B Testing

58. MINIONS:
Core
Features
S PageBenny Situ
Matthias Mullie Shahyar G Andrew Garrett
+Erik Bernhardson
+Kunal Metha
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors

59. Habits

61. Habit Loop
Cue
Routine
Reward

62. different user
Cue: See Wall Post/
Tweet
Routine: Click on stuff
Reward: Brag on social
network
Gameification Habit Loop
Cue
Routine
Reward

63. Echo & Flow

64. Echo & Flow

65. • From SQL to noSQL — Derick Rethans (Thr 10:30a)
• Schemas for the Real World — Carina C. Zona (Thr 2p)
• Exploiting new MySQL Features — Dave Stokes (Fri 9a)
Databases and Data Design

66. Echo & Flow

67. MINIONS:
Fundraising
Engineering
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors
(TBA)
Katie Horn
Sherah SmithAdam Wight

68. • Security Is Not a Feature — Elizabeth Smith (Wed 2p)
• Basic Intrusion Detections With PHPIDS — Gregory Wilson (Wed 3:30p)
• Two Factor Authentication and You —Christopher Stone (Thr 5p)
Security

69. MINIONS:
Fundraising
Engineering
http://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors
(TBA)
Katie Horn
Sherah SmithAdam Wight

70. FRAME:
Data-Driven

71. FRAME:
Data-Informed

72. MINIONS:
Services
(HIRING)
Gabriel Wicke
Matthew Walker (HIRING)

73. Frame: Service Oriented
Architecture

74. • Introduction to October CMS (Laravel) — Collin Schneider (Wed noon)
• How Silex and Cilex became the glue for a media transcoding application — Stefan
Koopmanship (Wed noon)
• What to expect from Drupal 8 — Larry Garfield (Wed 2p)
• Building Modules for Drupal 8 — Brant Wynn (Thr 3:30p)
• Faster Web Development with Yii 2 — Larry Ullman (Fri 9a)
Frameworks and CMSs

75. • Introduction to oAuth —Matt Frost (Wed 10:30a)
• Building Web Service Clients with Guzzle — Jeremy Lindblom (Thr 5p)
• Socket Programming with PHP — Elizabeth Smith (Fri 9a)
APIs and 3rd party services

76. Frame: Service Oriented
Architecture

78. Challenges

79. • Building scalable PHP applications using Google’s App Engine — Ian Barber (Wed 2p)
• Virtualization for Developers —John Coggeshall (Wed 5p)
• Composer: Stability and Semantic Versioning Demystified — Beau Simensen (Thr 2p)
Packaging and Operations

80. Challenges

81. CHALLENGE: “Oh Shit!” Graph
0
15000
30000
45000
60000
2001 2006 20112001 2006 2011
40%
30%
20%
10%

82. FRAME: Heat Death

83. Getting Started and Guided Tour
• To reverse the editor decline would take
between 1000-2000 additional active
editors per month
• If this 2% activates at the same rate as the
baseline, this gets us halfway there
0
25
50
75
100
% of total
Baseline Getting Started Edit Edit

84. CHALLENGE: Diversity

85. Places in world that humans have named

86. Places in the world which have a geographically
tagged Wikipedia article.

87. Gender Gap:
!
Total Internet
Source: Comscore
Male
Female

88. Gender Gap:
Wikipedia
Readership
Source: Comscore
Male
Female

89. Gender Gap:
Wikipedia
Active Editors
Source: 2011 Editor Survey
Male
Female

90. Effect on Movie Gender on Article Length

91. CHALLENGE: Mobile

92. • Adaptive Delivery — Josh Trout (Wed noon)
• Stop! Hammer time (HammerJS) — Josh Trout (Fri 10:30a)
Mobile

93. CHALLENGE: Mobile

94. Desktop vs. Mobile PageViews (proj)

95. Dimensionless numbers

96. (Real Desktop v. Mobile)
• Currently 14-18% of Wikipedias page views are Mobile
• Compares favorably to: overall Internet 18%
• However:
• Yelp is at 44%
• Pinterest is at 75%
• Facebook’s mobile visitors are 78%
• (Facebook bought out WhatsApp for $17-$19 billion)?! Hmmm…

97. Quotes from FY2014-2015 Annual Plan
• “Our mobile platform, for example, has experienced a dramatic increase in pageviews
since we upgraded it in 2011.”
• “…the release of mobile editing on smartphones outperformed our expectations,
suggesting that, despite our previous assumptions, users are interested in editing from
mobile devices.”
• “Alongside the potential risk identified above regarding recent movement of page views
from desktop to mobile, desktop readers donate three times more often than mobile
readers.”
• “We are also expanding our product and engineering teams to implement our mobile
strategy, in response to the dramatic increase in mobile traffic we are seeing throughout the
world.”

98. CHALLENGE: Resistance to change

99. Wikipedia reverts the Visual Editor
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/RFC
• https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:VisualEditor/Default_State_RFC
• https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Administrators
%27_noticeboard&oldid=574249260

100. Editing San Francisco

101. FRAME: Arrows Impossibility
Theorem
• unrestricted domain
• non-dictatorship
• Pareto efficiency
• independence of irrelevant alternatives

102. Parting Shot (Frame)

103. http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chicago_Downtown_Aerial_View.jpg

104. FRAME: The
Internet as a City

105. A vibrant city
supports lot of
private businesses
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Giordano%27s_Deep_Dish_Pizza.jpghttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Chicago_bot.jpghttps://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Oprah_Winfrey_in_Strøget,_Denmark_on_30_September_2009.jp https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/e/e0/Oprah_Winfrey_Network.png

106. But there is a
healthy amount of
public spaces too…
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Cloud_Gate_Chicago.jpghttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Nighthawks_by_Edward_Hopper_1942.jpg https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Grant_DeVolson_Wood_-_American_Gothic.jpghttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:St_Joseph_the_Betrothed_080202.jpghttp://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Stjoessnowy.jpg

107. On the Internet
there are a lot of
private entities

108. …but is there are
healthy number of
public spaces?

109. Wikipedia is a big
deal…

110. One of the few
prominent public
spaces

111. Maybe encourage
you to…
CREATE!

112. The Power of Frames
http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:Frames_for_sale.JPG