Wiki Project Medicine Builds Its Own Community Tech Team

Photo by Imagine Buddy on Unsplash

In May, the Wikimedia Foundation laid off Brooke Vibber. A week later it wound down Community Tech, the small team that existed to build what volunteer editors asked for. I’ve written elsewhere about why I think both were the wrong call.

Brooke became lead developer of MediaWiki, the software that runs Wikipedia, in early 2003. She was the first full-time employee the Foundation ever hired and its first Chief Technical Officer. For more than twenty years she was the person you called when something broke deep in the code, and the Foundation once called her one of the few people alive who truly understand how that machinery works.

She was also helping organize Wiki Workers United, the staff union forming inside the Foundation. Her last day was May 26, and the community marked June 1 as Brooke Vibber Day.

That is the kind of institutional knowledge that takes years to build and a moment to lose.

Community Tech was the second loss. Five engineers and a manager whose job was to turn the requests editors filed through the Community Wishlist into working features. Disbanded in a single announcement.

I lead ‘Impact’ for Wiki Project Med, as in medicine. Wiki Project Med improves medical articles, yes, but it also builds infrastructure the whole movement relies on.

Start with the offline work. With Kiwix, Wiki Project Med ships the Medical Wikipedia app, which puts Wikipedia’s and MDWiki’s health content on a phone, fully offline. It runs on Android, iOS, Windows, macOS, and Linux, with more than 120,000 active installs on Android, though fewer on iOS. It is used most heavily in Pakistan, India, Nepal, and Egypt, often by health workers and students.

The same content also ships inside Internet-in-a-Box, a self-contained Wifi hotspot for settings with no internet at all. The project has sent out more than 1,100 of them, each designed to support around 20 people on a local network.

Then there is MDWiki. English Wikipedia carries an enormous amount of medical content, but it was never built to be translated, and some things patients need, like medication dosing, aren’t allowed there. So the project created MDWiki.org to host reviewed, translation-ready versions of that content.

On top of it runs a translation dashboard the project built and keeps refining, coordinating the volunteers who carry health articles from English into other languages. The effort goes back to 2011 and was relaunched on this dashboard in 2021. By the project’s own count, across its full run it has produced more than 25,000 translations in over 150 languages, drawing billions of page views.

Wiki Project Med created NCCommons.org, a repository for the non-commercial and no-derivatives files that Wikimedia Commons won’t accept. In a single grant period it took in roughly nine million of them, the first serious effort to gather the world’s NC and ND content in one place.

It built VideoWiki, which turns a wiki-based script into video that editors can recompile and translate, and has carried hundreds of medical — and general — videos across seventeen languages.

It developed a browser-based viewer for CT and MRI imaging.

It stood up a mirror of Our World in Data, with interactive graphs that can be integrated into MediaWiki, the software behind Wikipedia, and has since added two more ways to bring that material into articles live, now working in about a dozen languages. All of this in the same years the community was still trying to get working data visualizations back into articles.

It built a modular calculator that editors can configure for any live calculation, already live on more than 190 English Wikipedia articles.

It adopted the crop tool that is now standard on Commons and continues to develop and maintain it, and it built an annotation tool there as well.

That is shared plumbing the whole movement uses, built by a small medical nonprofit with a modest budget and a team spread across several countries. They kept asking what editors actually needed, and then built it.

Now, Brooke Vibber is joining Wiki Project Med’s new Community Tech team.

The team will work through the Community Wishlist, the same backlog the Foundation’s Community Tech team used to take on, starting with the wishes that are simplest to ship. The people doing it are some of the most accomplished developers in the MediaWiki world.

Brooke Vibber shaped and safeguarded the software for more than twenty years, and few people alive understand its internals as deeply.

Brian Wolff, who edits as Bawolff, has worked on MediaWiki’s core since 2009 and spent years on the Foundation’s security team, finding the holes in the software the world reads and closing them before anyone else did. He keeps a public list of the vulnerabilities he has pulled out of the code. He is the engineer who fixes the bug everyone else is afraid to touch.

Yaron Koren has done as much as anyone to make MediaWiki useful beyond Wikipedia. He founded the consulting firm WikiWorks and wrote more than fifteen extensions, including Page Forms and Cargo, which turn a wiki into something close to a database. He also wrote Working with MediaWiki, the standard reference for the software, with a foreword by Brooke Vibber that tells you how long these people have worked alongside each other.

Steering all of it is James Heilman, the emergency physician who founded Wiki Project Med and was twice elected by the community to the Wikimedia Foundation’s Board of Trustees. He sits on the oversight group that decides which wishes the team takes on.

A volunteer-rooted nonprofit just brought together the most influential MediaWiki developer alive, one of its sharpest security minds, and the person who wrote the book on the software, and pointed all of them at the Community Wishlist.

Wiki Project Med is funded primarily by the WMF. The simpler wishes the team can build and ship on its own. The bigger ones often mean changing MediaWiki’s core and running code on production servers.

Only the Foundation can authorize that, so the team will work closely with WMF staff to get larger wishes reviewed and deployed.

The project has already seen how that can go. It built MP4 video conversion for Commons, still waiting on the Foundation’s sign-off.

The wishes editors filed can still get built, and the simplest ones already are. They are in the hands of people who have spent entire careers proving they can build what people in the movement need and want.

If you were ready to give up on the projects this month, here is your reason not to: the mission outlives the org chart.