Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
When I start from this page: http://wikiedu.org/blog/2014/11/07/user-testing-assignment-design-wizard/ and I click the wizard.wikiedu.org http://wikiedu.org/blog/2014/11/07/user-testing-assignment-design-wizard/wizard.wikiedu.org link I arrive in a page which says: This is somewhat embarrassing, isn’t it?Is this the aim? Regards http://wikiedu.org/blog/2014/11/07/user-testing-assignment-design-wizard/wizard.wikiedu.org On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 6:35 AM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 5:58 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Indeed, highly specialized tools for the cultural and education sector _are_ being developed and hosted inside Tool Labs or externally. Looking at the current OAuth consumer requests [5], there are submissions for a metadata editor developed by librarians at the University of Miami Libraries in Coral Gables, Florida, and an assignment creation wizard developed by the Wiki Education Foundation. The Wiki Education Foundation just introduced its Assignment Wizard, which is being developed with the help of an outside agency. As this tool develops, there may be opportunities for sharing experiences with other Wikimedia organizations: http://wikiedu.org/blog/2014/11/07/user-testing-assignment-design-wizard/ Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Product Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- Ilario Valdelli Wikimedia CH Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Association pour l’avancement des connaissances libre Associazione per il sostegno alla conoscenza libera Switzerland - 8008 Zürich Wikipedia: Ilario https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ilario Skype: valdelli Facebook: Ilario Valdelli https://www.facebook.com/ivaldelli Twitter: Ilario Valdelli https://twitter.com/ilariovaldelli Linkedin: Ilario Valdelli http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=6724469 Tel: +41764821371 http://www.wikimedia.ch ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 1:03 AM, Ilario Valdelli valde...@gmail.com wrote: When I start from this page: http://wikiedu.org/blog/2014/11/07/user-testing-assignment-design-wizard/ and I click the wizard.wikiedu.org http://wikiedu.org/blog/2014/11/07/user-testing-assignment-design-wizard/wizard.wikiedu.org link I arrive in a page which says: This is somewhat embarrassing, isn’t it?Is this the aim? Embarassing indeed! There was a misformed link in the blog post. It now points to http://wizard.wikiedu.org as intended. -Sage ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 5:58 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Indeed, highly specialized tools for the cultural and education sector _are_ being developed and hosted inside Tool Labs or externally. Looking at the current OAuth consumer requests [5], there are submissions for a metadata editor developed by librarians at the University of Miami Libraries in Coral Gables, Florida, and an assignment creation wizard developed by the Wiki Education Foundation. The Wiki Education Foundation just introduced its Assignment Wizard, which is being developed with the help of an outside agency. As this tool develops, there may be opportunities for sharing experiences with other Wikimedia organizations: http://wikiedu.org/blog/2014/11/07/user-testing-assignment-design-wizard/ Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Product Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
Hi Erik, To specifically respond to your question, and as you know, WMCH does have plans to hire a developer next year for its offline dissemination program (ie KIWIX) [1][2]. Since Europeana had indicated its interest into maintaining/developing it the GWToolset, we decided to focus our efforts on keeping Kiwix going (that's also where our relationship with the community is strongest). This being said, we also do intend to be heavily using the GlamWikiToolset next year already, and may therefore need to develop our own extensions as needs arise. We however first need to find out what such needs are/will be, and how Europeana will handle the load. But yes, to answer your question we do plan on having a dedicated chapter staff whom you will be able to work with (provided the current APG request goes well enough, of course). Cheers Stephane [1] *https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_CH/Proposal_form#Offline_Dissemination_Program https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_CH/Proposal_form#Offline_Dissemination_Program* [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kiwix_-_Wikipedia_Offline Original Message Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 11:45:50 -0700 From: Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org Reply-To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Just pinging this thread -- looking through all the proposals for annual plan grants: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_%C3%96sterreich/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_UK/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Sverige/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Serbia/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Nederland/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Israel/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Eesti/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Deutschland_e.V./Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_CH/Proposal_form I'm not seeing any developer contract time allocated to GLAM tooling work yet. At the same time I'm seeing reports of breakage and missing functionality in important tools running in Labs. To the extent that this breakage is due to Labs infrastructure or access to data, it's our job (WMF) to fix it and you should (continue to) poke us to do so -- but to the extent that it can be addressed in the tools themselves, I'd love to see chapters take this on directly. It's possible that I'm missing something. Are there more concrete plans at this point in time to help support the tools developed by Magnus and others, and create new reports on an as-needed basis? Having a dedicated staff person in chapters or an affilicate like Europeana who WMF analytics can partner with would be really helpful for keeping this moving, in my view. Thanks, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Product Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
[Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
Hi Stéphane, I'm currently sitting in the plenary hall of the Europeana AGM in Prado Museum in Madrid and, quite literally, right now is the presentation is about the 2015 business plan. What the organisation will prioritise etc. etc. Therefore, it's a perfectly timed email to mention the GLAMwikiToolset [GWT] and Europeana! Several Wikimedians from European Chapters, Maria from the WMF Board of Trustees, and other 'friends of the family' are here too. In this specific context I should say that in the last weeks of practical planning for 2015, we've narrowed down the scope of what Europeana will be wiling and able to support in the Wikiverse. It was decided that while Europeana does want to fix bugs, improve documentation and give some more 'polish' to the GWT, it has decided that committing to the ongoing development of an integrated, content-agnostic, clear user-interface, for Wikimedia Commons is actually beyond the scope of the organisation. Ultimately Europeana's mission is about European GLAM content and it can no longer justify being the 'business owner' for the large development task that would be creating the fully-featured integrated Commons system. To be clear: Europeana is not 'leaving' and wants to help improve the tool as it currently exists (as well as remain involved in a variety of other GLAMwiki activities), but the organisation wanted to be clear in setting expectations that it will *not* be building the Mass-upload equivalent of the Upload Wizard. From a personal perspective, as the guy who was pushing for the funding/creation of the magical, easy, beautiful mass-upload system since... I forget how long ago now... I would love to see investment (by anyone), but in my professional perspective I understand the need for Europeana to clearly define the scope of its activities - and a mass-uploader for anyone, with any content, to Wikimedia (with all the extremely complex usability, templates, metadata... requirements that this entails) is actually outside the scope of its mission. - Liam, in my capacity as Europeana GLAMwiki Coordinator. wittylama.com Peace, love metadata On 31 October 2014 11:11, Stéphane Coillet-Matillon stephane.coil...@mail.wikimedia.ch wrote: Hi Erik, To specifically respond to your question, and as you know, WMCH does have plans to hire a developer next year for its offline dissemination program (ie KIWIX) [1][2]. Since Europeana had indicated its interest into maintaining/developing it the GWToolset, we decided to focus our efforts on keeping Kiwix going (that's also where our relationship with the community is strongest). This being said, we also do intend to be heavily using the GlamWikiToolset next year already, and may therefore need to develop our own extensions as needs arise. We however first need to find out what such needs are/will be, and how Europeana will handle the load. But yes, to answer your question we do plan on having a dedicated chapter staff whom you will be able to work with (provided the current APG request goes well enough, of course). Cheers Stephane [1] * https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_CH/Proposal_form#Offline_Dissemination_Program https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_CH/Proposal_form#Offline_Dissemination_Program * [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Kiwix_-_Wikipedia_Offline Original Message Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling Date: Fri, 24 Oct 2014 11:45:50 -0700 From: Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org Reply-To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Just pinging this thread -- looking through all the proposals for annual plan grants: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_%C3%96sterreich/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_UK/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Sverige/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Serbia/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Nederland/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Israel/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Eesti/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Deutschland_e.V./Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_CH/Proposal_form I'm not seeing any developer contract time allocated to GLAM tooling work yet. At the same time I'm seeing reports of breakage and missing functionality in important tools running in Labs
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
Erik Moeller wrote: On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 7:16 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Labs is a playground and Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums are serious enough to warrant a proper investment of resources, in my view. Magnus and many others develop magnificent tools, but my sense is that they're largely proofs of concept, not final implementations. Far from being treated as mere proofs of concept, Magnus' GLAM tools [1] have been used to measure and report success in the context of project grant and annual plan proposals and reports, ongoing project performance measurements, blog posts and press releases, etc. Daniel Mietchen has, to my knowledge, been the main person doing any systematic auditing or verification of the reports generated by these tools, and results can be found in his tool testing reports, the last one of which is unfortunately more than a year old. [2] It's funny that you mention This Month in GLAM as my now-defunct bot delivered its monthly newsletter for quite some time. The MassMessage MediaWiki extension is a pretty great case study of exactly what I'm discussing here: turning a proof-of-concept script into a supported and maintained tool that's integrated with MediaWiki. :-) While it's tedious to get an extension deployed, the (ideal) result is that it has documentation, it's gone through series of review (performance, security, architecture, and design) and we know where the source code is and how to build it. That's not nothing! Integration with MediaWiki should IMO not be viewed as a runway that all useful developments must be pushed towards. Rather, we should seek to establish clearer criteria by which to decide that functionality benefits from this level of integration, to such an extent that it justifies the cost. Functionality that is not integrated in this manner should, then, not be dismissed as proofs of concept but rather judged on its own merits. Sure, I agree with this in principle. When I consider Labs (or Tool Labs), I think of the Toolserver: https://toolserver.org/~magnus/. My point was that GLAMs should be taken seriously. The Wikimedia Foundation's historical track record with regard to GLAM support isn't great. And from the perspective of these institutions, I continue to believe that it makes sense to invest in long-term solutions, even if they're more costly in terms of time and money. Wikimedia DC has been hosting meet-ups at the National Archives lately. The National Archives has been in the free content business a lot longer than the Wikimedia Foundation, eh. ;-) They know that hacking together a few scripts on Labs isn't going to integrate their enormous collection of accumulated holdings that we want in our projects and that they want to share with the world. Labs _is_ a playground, just as the Toolserver was. Volunteers created some incredible scripts and tools, but how many are still around today? I maintained many scripts and bots for years, but eventually you lose interest, you have other priorities, life moves on, and yet the need for such tools has only grown. As noted before, for tools like the ones used for GLAM reporting to get better, WMF has its role to play in providing more datasets and improved infrastructure. But there's nothing inherent in the development of those tools that forces them to live in production land, or that requires large development teams to move them forward. If these tools want to be around in five or ten years from now, then I disagree. I've spent far too long watching far too many people walk away, abandoning their previous pet projects. That's certainly their prerogative as volunteers and I don't blame the Wikimedia Foundation or anyone else for their departure, but that doesn't mean there's not a real issue here in terms of creating lasting, sustainable software. This isn't to say that every MediaWiki extension is some garden of Eden where there's no code rot. But at least the current extension process creates a much higher likelihood of long-term success than the alternatives. I wouldn't be so quick to discount it. MediaWiki _is_ the platform, in my view. I wonder: if we relabeled MediaWiki extensions and started calling them apps, would it be easier to sell everyone on the idea of the need for more of them? - Improved software and infrastructure support for A/B testing, possibly including adoption of existing open source tooling such as Facebook's PlanOut library/interpreter [14]. I'll split this out into a separate thread. In general, the point of my original message was this: All organizations that seek to improve Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects ultimately depend on technology to do so; to view WMF as the sole tech provider does not scale. Larger, well-funded chapters can take on big, hairy challenges like Wikidata; smaller, less-funded orgs are better positioned to work on specialized technical support for programmatic work. Sure, I agree with this as well. And
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
Erik Moeller wrote: I'm not seeing any developer contract time allocated to GLAM tooling work yet. At the same time I'm seeing reports of breakage and missing functionality in important tools running in Labs. To the extent that this breakage is due to Labs infrastructure or access to data, it's our job (WMF) to fix it and you should (continue to) poke us to do so -- but to the extent that it can be addressed in the tools themselves, I'd love to see chapters take this on directly. Maybe, but we need to clearly define what a smart investment of resources looks like. In my opinion, it's much closer to the development of an extension such as GWToolset than it is to trying to have someone hack at a few PHP scripts on Wikimedia Labs. Labs is a playground and Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums are serious enough to warrant a proper investment of resources, in my view. Magnus and many others develop magnificent tools, but my sense is that they're largely proofs of concept, not final implementations. We need to build infrastructure, and while Labs is itself infrastructure, it's really a sandbox for neat ideas, not a proper resolution to technical problems facing the wikis. If people want to substantively contribute to the technical ecosystem, that requires fully integrating into it. This typically means developing and supporting a deployed MediaWiki extension or, more rarely, integrating directly into MediaWiki core. This type of development requires an intelligent and focused set of requirements for new extensions or development projects that gets a thorough review (and sign-off) by the people who will ultimately be deploying and indefinitely hosting this code. GLAMs and Chapters could make all kinds of investments into new functionality for the projects. Improved Wikidata modeling and data entry into Wikidata, an in-browser SVG (or rasterized image) editor, better media search, enhancements to Wikisource/OCR, etc. There's no shortage of work to be done, but it's moderately challenging currently to develop scalable solutions to the larger problems. If GLAMs and Chapters aren't willing to try to tackle a harder problem, there are also plenty of smaller improvements needed to both MediaWiki and its hundreds of extensions that could also benefit everyone. But again, the focus would be integrating into the Wikimedia technical platform and fixing issues in production, rather than trying to make Labs scripts and tools better. MZMcBride ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
Hoi, There are several issues and imho the one Erik mentions is crucial. When no money is intended for GLAM tool related work, nothing will happen. The situation will remain one where everybody is eying each other... are you going to make a move ... are you? If you are all for a comprehensive technical infra structure blabla, all well and good. Nothing is going to happen without an initiative and, any initiative that does not have funding support will end up on Labs. Fiddling with small scale improvements are nice, it will provide some solace but what we need is a next generation of tools and of particular importance is reporting. An environment is being developed for statistics and reporting but as far as I can see it is either really hard or developments are not being communicated or there is not much to report anyway. Erik challenges the chapters. I hope the chapters rise to the occasion and define a plan. From what I observed the most important part of the products that are of use to GLAMS, stability is the main thing. We need continuous reporting. We need the continuous availability of tools. That is very much more than only a question of Labs or not Labs. If anything it is a challenge to Erik how he envisions to provide a platform for statistics that will be continuously available and how he will ensure that tools are stable and are available. Thanks, GerardM PS The statistics for Wikidata are still broken and who is going to tackle that and the break in reporting ??? On 25 October 2014 16:16, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Erik Moeller wrote: I'm not seeing any developer contract time allocated to GLAM tooling work yet. At the same time I'm seeing reports of breakage and missing functionality in important tools running in Labs. To the extent that this breakage is due to Labs infrastructure or access to data, it's our job (WMF) to fix it and you should (continue to) poke us to do so -- but to the extent that it can be addressed in the tools themselves, I'd love to see chapters take this on directly. Maybe, but we need to clearly define what a smart investment of resources looks like. In my opinion, it's much closer to the development of an extension such as GWToolset than it is to trying to have someone hack at a few PHP scripts on Wikimedia Labs. Labs is a playground and Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums are serious enough to warrant a proper investment of resources, in my view. Magnus and many others develop magnificent tools, but my sense is that they're largely proofs of concept, not final implementations. We need to build infrastructure, and while Labs is itself infrastructure, it's really a sandbox for neat ideas, not a proper resolution to technical problems facing the wikis. If people want to substantively contribute to the technical ecosystem, that requires fully integrating into it. This typically means developing and supporting a deployed MediaWiki extension or, more rarely, integrating directly into MediaWiki core. This type of development requires an intelligent and focused set of requirements for new extensions or development projects that gets a thorough review (and sign-off) by the people who will ultimately be deploying and indefinitely hosting this code. GLAMs and Chapters could make all kinds of investments into new functionality for the projects. Improved Wikidata modeling and data entry into Wikidata, an in-browser SVG (or rasterized image) editor, better media search, enhancements to Wikisource/OCR, etc. There's no shortage of work to be done, but it's moderately challenging currently to develop scalable solutions to the larger problems. If GLAMs and Chapters aren't willing to try to tackle a harder problem, there are also plenty of smaller improvements needed to both MediaWiki and its hundreds of extensions that could also benefit everyone. But again, the focus would be integrating into the Wikimedia technical platform and fixing issues in production, rather than trying to make Labs scripts and tools better. MZMcBride ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
MZMcBride, 25/10/2014 16:16: But again, the focus would be integrating into the Wikimedia technical platform and fixing issues in production, rather than trying to make Labs scripts and tools better. False dichotomy IMHO. Usual example:* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/42259 Quite clearly WMF's responsibility to make it possible, but all the interfaces and value are in consumers/tools. Nemo (*) Yes, I know https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Page_view is being worked on. ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote: MZMcBride, 25/10/2014 16:16: But again, the focus would be integrating into the Wikimedia technical platform and fixing issues in production, rather than trying to make Labs scripts and tools better. False dichotomy IMHO. Usual example:* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/42259 Quite clearly WMF's responsibility to make it possible, but all the interfaces and value are in consumers/tools. Nemo (*) Yes, I know https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Page_view is being worked on. I think it's a limited view to suggest that the Wikimedia Foundation should only provide raw dumps and/or queryable data and have volunteers try to cobble together scripts and tools to interact with the data. That certainly can and should be a piece of this, but there's no good reason not to, for example, integrate page view graphs into MediaWiki's info action, allowing regular users to see quickly and easily see an article's page views over time. We already have queryable revision information, but we rely on external tools and services to try to graph edits over time, rather than having visual functionality integrated into MediaWiki. The same is true of visualizing a particular user's edits or other logged actions. We're relying on external tools when we should be trying to create tools that live within the technical platform that we've created. A generalized, scaleable graphing/visualization tool would be an excellent use of resources. Making such a tool could easily have a definable goal with clear requirements, and implementing and deploying such a tool would have a very clear benefit to all of our projects. We have a real problem turning proofs of concept into stable infrastructure. GLAMs and Chapters can invest in creating stable infrastructure, but that probably doesn't mean investing in Labs, exactly. Not if you want to have a long-term, substantive impact, in my opinion. Regarding page views data specifically, the Wikimedia Foundation has done a good deal of cookie-licking in this area and that really should be addressed. The linked bug report demonstrates what I'm talking about. It's been _years_ of waiting as various analytics team have come and gone (does anyone remember when Open Web Analytics was going to save the day?). And yet it's 2014 and we still can't answer the most basic analytics questions such as how many views did X article get this month? There has been some deep dysfunction in this area of the Wikimedia Foundation, but I don't know what any GLAM institution or Wikimedia Chapter can do about the analytics situation, so it may be best to focus on other areas in which making an impact is feasible. MZMcBride ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
On 10/25/2014 01:50 PM, MZMcBride wrote: [...] that probably doesn't mean investing in Labs, exactly. Not if you want to have a long-term, substantive impact, in my opinion. I'd like to address that particular recurrent canard here, if I may. Things that reside in labs are empathically /not/ second-class citizens by any stretch of the imagination. Perhaps our attempts to emphasise that Labs is not production were not clear enough about what me mean by the distinction - and because of that people have gotten the wrong impression about it. What not production means is simply a matter of (a) scaling and (b) service level. For the latter, all it means in practice is that if something in labs breaks not all of ops will drop what they are doing to attend it as we would for prod. It doesn't mean that we don't care that it broke, nor that it is of lesser importance - just that the impact is lower and therefore it is not reasonable to divert all resources to the issue. As for scaling, it will almost never be an issue until something becomes used frequently by a large fraction of the projects' user base. Labs remains a perfectly reasonable permanent home for anything that expects light or medium use - whether it's volunteer-driven or WMF-driven (deployment-prep is an excellent example of a service that lives in Labs which is used continually by almost all the devs and yet will never live in prod). Labs isn't a second-grade production for unimportant things; it's a more flexible, more open environment for general tooling and development. If anything, it's /prod/ that is more restricted (in who can use it, how complicated it is to be allowed to deploy there, what restrictions are place on what is there). Any GLAM tools would almost certainly live in Labs - whether it's been developped by the WMF, volunteers or Chapters - not because it's not worthy of production but because trying to make it into production services would make development and deployment immensely more complicated and much less flexible. The question shouldn't be Do we need to invest in Labs but How to we avoid the trouble of having to do this in production. -- Marc ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 7:16 AM, MZMcBride z...@mzmcbride.com wrote: Labs is a playground and Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums are serious enough to warrant a proper investment of resources, in my view. Magnus and many others develop magnificent tools, but my sense is that they're largely proofs of concept, not final implementations. Far from being treated as mere proofs of concept, Magnus' GLAM tools [1] have been used to measure and report success in the context of project grant and annual plan proposals and reports, ongoing project performance measurements, blog posts and press releases, etc. Daniel Mietchen has, to my knowledge, been the main person doing any systematic auditing or verification of the reports generated by these tools, and results can be found in his tool testing reports, the last one of which is unfortunately more than a year old. [2] Integration with MediaWiki should IMO not be viewed as a runway that all useful developments must be pushed towards. Rather, we should seek to establish clearer criteria by which to decide that functionality benefits from this level of integration, to such an extent that it justifies the cost. Functionality that is not integrated in this manner should, then, not be dismissed as proofs of concept but rather judged on its own merits. GWToolset [3] is a good example. It was built as a MediaWiki extension to manage GLAM batch uploads, but we should not regard this decision as sacrosanct, or the only correct way to develop this kind of functionality. The functionality it provides is of highly specialized interest, and indeed, the number of potential users to-date is 47 according to [4], most of whom have not performed significant uploads yet. Its user interface is highly specialized and special permissions + detailed instructions are required to use it. At the same time, it has been used to upload 322,911 files overall, an amazing number even without going into the quality and value of the individual collections. So, why does it need to be a MediaWiki extension at all? When development began in 2012, OAuth support in MediaWiki did not exist, so it was impossible for an external tool (then running on toolserver) to manage an upload on the user's behalf without asking for the user's password, which would have been in violation of policy. But today, we have other options. It's possible that storage requirements or other specific desired integration points would make it impossible to create this as a Tool Labs tool -- but if we created the same tool today, we should carefully consider that. Indeed, highly specialized tools for the cultural and education sector _are_ being developed and hosted inside Tool Labs or externally. Looking at the current OAuth consumer requests [5], there are submissions for a metadata editor developed by librarians at the University of Miami Libraries in Coral Gables, Florida, and an assignment creation wizard developed by the Wiki Education Foundation. There's nothing improper about that, as Marc-André pointed out. As noted before, for tools like the ones used for GLAM reporting to get better, WMF has its role to play in providing more datasets and improved infrastructure. But there's nothing inherent in the development of those tools that forces them to live in production land, or that requires large development teams to move them forward. Auditing of numbers, improved scheduling/queuing of database requests, optimization of API calls and DB queries; all of this can be done by individual contributors, making this suitable work for even chapters with limited experience managing technical projects to take on. On the analytics side, we're well aware that many users have asked for better access to the pageview data, either through MariaDB, or through a dedicated API. We have now said for some time that our focus is on modernizing the infrastructure for log analysis and collection, because the numbers collected by the old webstatscollector code were incomplete, and the infrastructure subject to frequent packet loss issues. In addition, our ability to meet additional requirements on the basis of simple pageview aggregation code was inherently constrained. To this end, we have put into production use infrastructure to collect and analyze site traffic using Kafka/Hadoop/Hive. At our scale, this has been a tremendously complex infrastructure project which has included custom development such as varnishkafka [6]. While it's taken longer than we've wanted, this new infrastructure is being used to generate a public page count dataset as of this month, including article-level mobile traffic for the first time [7]. Using Hadoop/Hive, we'll be able to compile many more specialized reports, and this is only just beginning. Giving community developers better access to this data needs to be prioritized relative to other ongoing analytics work, including but not limited to: - Continued development and maintenance of the above
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
Just pinging this thread -- looking through all the proposals for annual plan grants: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_%C3%96sterreich/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_UK/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Sverige/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Serbia/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Nederland/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Israel/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Eesti/Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_Deutschland_e.V./Proposal_form https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:APG/Proposals/2014-2015_round1/Wikimedia_CH/Proposal_form I'm not seeing any developer contract time allocated to GLAM tooling work yet. At the same time I'm seeing reports of breakage and missing functionality in important tools running in Labs. To the extent that this breakage is due to Labs infrastructure or access to data, it's our job (WMF) to fix it and you should (continue to) poke us to do so -- but to the extent that it can be addressed in the tools themselves, I'd love to see chapters take this on directly. It's possible that I'm missing something. Are there more concrete plans at this point in time to help support the tools developed by Magnus and others, and create new reports on an as-needed basis? Having a dedicated staff person in chapters or an affilicate like Europeana who WMF analytics can partner with would be really helpful for keeping this moving, in my view. Thanks, Erik -- Erik Möller VP of Product Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
Similarly to what you are describing, Micru, BeWelcome has a process to identify issues and resolve them in a community discussion. It’s a sort of communal product specification/design. The process looks like: [1] 1/ firstly, community members can submit issues or product ideas, 2/ secondly, there is a discussion with proposed resolutions, 3/ thirdly, a vote between the various proposed resolutions, 4/ lastly, the development phase itself. Although we have some sort of such process (Idea lab, RFC, mailing lists, bug tracker, MediaWiki.org), it’s not as easy to find where are the ideas of products, where are the development of these ideas, and where and how you can give your voice to influence the path of the development. Personally I like a lot the BeWelcome process (and it’s a non-technical member who presented me that), and I find you could reuse it in Wikimedia, probably in a customized form, and with short and intuitive product ideas and resolutions (avoid too long pages at first sight). [1] https://www.bewelcome.org/suggestions/about ~ Seb35 Le mardi 26 juin 2014 15:12:03 (CEST), David Cuenca a écrit : Erik (and others), is there any coordination page where groups could place, take, or discuss requests for development or requests for maintenance? I saw often that sometimes the hard-to-achieve consensus is found, but there is no way to evaluate the idea further. What now happens is: - several development proposals materialize through different channels (community, user groups, idea lab, RFCs, etc) - there is a general consensus about project A - limbo or an IEG, but as Ilario says, that doesn't guarantee its future viability or integration with current or planned workflows, or availability of resources for maintenance It would be more rational to have a further step in the pipeline where development ideas could be commented, shot down, or approved for further commitment by the ones who actually can understand how they fit in the broader product management/life-cycle context (engineering? PMs? chapters?). There are often community ideas that on first sight look great, but when you think about the potential problems, implications, costs, or stepping on the toes of other developments, that it is more rational not to start them or delay them until certain conditions are met. But no voice is heard, and that causes frustration and a sense of disconnection in the community, when just a single statement this shouldn't be done because X, would make everyone more aware of the limits. And the opposite too, when some idea gather community support and is green-lighted for further commitment, that would make chapters or other organizations more confident about what is wanted and how. Micru On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 5:54 AM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi folks, At the Zurich Hackathon, I met with a couple of folks from WM-CH who were interested in talking about ways that chapters can get involved in engineering/product development, similar to WM-DE's work on Wikidata. My recommendation to them was to consider working on GLAM-related tooling. This includes helping improve some of the reporting tools currently running in Labs (primarily developed by the illustrious and wonderful Magnus Manske in his spare time), but also meeting other requirements identified by the GLAM community [1] and potentially helping with the development of more complex MediaWiki-integrated tools like the GLAMWiki-Toolset. There's work that only WMF is well positioned to do (like feeding all media view data into Hadoop and providing generalized reports and APIs), but a lot of work in the aforementioned categories could be done by any chapter and could easily be scaled up from 1 to 2 to 3 FTEs and beyond as warranted. That's because a lot of the tools are separate from MediaWiki, so code review and integration requirements are lower, and it's easier for technically proficient folks to help. In short, I think this could provide a nice on-ramp for a chapter or chapters to support the work of volunteers in the cultural sector with appropriate technology. This availability of appropriate technology is clearly increasingly a distinguishing factor for Wikimedia relative to more commercial offerings in its appeal to the cultural sector. At the same time, WMF itself doesn't currently prioritize work with the cultural sector very highly, which I think is appropriate given all the other problems we have to solve. So if this kind of work has to compete for attention with much more basic improvements to say the uploading pipeline or the editing tools, it's going to lose. Therefore I think having a cultural tooling team or teams in the larger movement would be appropriate. I've not heard back from WM-CH yet on this, but I also don't think it's an exclusive suggestion, so wanted to put the idea in people's heads in case other organizations in the movement want to help with it. I do want WMF
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
I will add this to my ever-growing list of possible projects for Cascadia. There are a few other projects under consideration that have received little WMF support but I feel are movement-aligned and would interest the public or the contributor base. In order for Cascadia to work on these projects there will be several steps such as getting AffCom approval for Cascadia, consensus of the Cascadians of what we want to do as a group, and finding people with the necessary technical expertise. I'm speculating that we might hire on a contract basis for short-term software projects if GAC or the FDC support that approach, or we might put out an RFP. In general I would say this sounds like a project we might want to support. A number of our members have technical, research, or GLAM interests. Of course, if WMCH wants to do this work and can do it faster than Cascadia, or someone makes a good proposal to work on this project through IEG or GSOC/OPW, that is ok. We in Cascadia are still very early in our development and we can find other work to do if we decide that we want to support movement-wide projects. Pine* * Speaking only in a personal capacity On Wed, Jun 25, 2014 at 8:54 PM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi folks, At the Zurich Hackathon, I met with a couple of folks from WM-CH who were interested in talking about ways that chapters can get involved in engineering/product development, similar to WM-DE's work on Wikidata. My recommendation to them was to consider working on GLAM-related tooling. This includes helping improve some of the reporting tools currently running in Labs (primarily developed by the illustrious and wonderful Magnus Manske in his spare time), but also meeting other requirements identified by the GLAM community [1] and potentially helping with the development of more complex MediaWiki-integrated tools like the GLAMWiki-Toolset. There's work that only WMF is well positioned to do (like feeding all media view data into Hadoop and providing generalized reports and APIs), but a lot of work in the aforementioned categories could be done by any chapter and could easily be scaled up from 1 to 2 to 3 FTEs and beyond as warranted. That's because a lot of the tools are separate from MediaWiki, so code review and integration requirements are lower, and it's easier for technically proficient folks to help. In short, I think this could provide a nice on-ramp for a chapter or chapters to support the work of volunteers in the cultural sector with appropriate technology. This availability of appropriate technology is clearly increasingly a distinguishing factor for Wikimedia relative to more commercial offerings in its appeal to the cultural sector. At the same time, WMF itself doesn't currently prioritize work with the cultural sector very highly, which I think is appropriate given all the other problems we have to solve. So if this kind of work has to compete for attention with much more basic improvements to say the uploading pipeline or the editing tools, it's going to lose. Therefore I think having a cultural tooling team or teams in the larger movement would be appropriate. I've not heard back from WM-CH yet on this, but I also don't think it's an exclusive suggestion, so wanted to put the idea in people's heads in case other organizations in the movement want to help with it. I do want WMF to solve the larger infrastructure problems, but the more specialized tooling is likely _not_ going to be high on our agenda anytime soon. Thanks, Erik [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Report_on_requirements_for_usage_and_reuse_statistics_for_GLAM_content.pdf -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
Thanks Erik, This is certainly something we are keen to work on. I was talking to Magnus just last night and of course our experience with Europeana has taught us a lot )I hope we have fully learnt the messages!). We are undertaking a scoping review of our Development plans at the moment and this will be part of the consideration. Jon On 26 June 2014 04:54, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi folks, At the Zurich Hackathon, I met with a couple of folks from WM-CH who were interested in talking about ways that chapters can get involved in engineering/product development, similar to WM-DE's work on Wikidata. My recommendation to them was to consider working on GLAM-related tooling. This includes helping improve some of the reporting tools currently running in Labs (primarily developed by the illustrious and wonderful Magnus Manske in his spare time), but also meeting other requirements identified by the GLAM community [1] and potentially helping with the development of more complex MediaWiki-integrated tools like the GLAMWiki-Toolset. There's work that only WMF is well positioned to do (like feeding all media view data into Hadoop and providing generalized reports and APIs), but a lot of work in the aforementioned categories could be done by any chapter and could easily be scaled up from 1 to 2 to 3 FTEs and beyond as warranted. That's because a lot of the tools are separate from MediaWiki, so code review and integration requirements are lower, and it's easier for technically proficient folks to help. In short, I think this could provide a nice on-ramp for a chapter or chapters to support the work of volunteers in the cultural sector with appropriate technology. This availability of appropriate technology is clearly increasingly a distinguishing factor for Wikimedia relative to more commercial offerings in its appeal to the cultural sector. At the same time, WMF itself doesn't currently prioritize work with the cultural sector very highly, which I think is appropriate given all the other problems we have to solve. So if this kind of work has to compete for attention with much more basic improvements to say the uploading pipeline or the editing tools, it's going to lose. Therefore I think having a cultural tooling team or teams in the larger movement would be appropriate. I've not heard back from WM-CH yet on this, but I also don't think it's an exclusive suggestion, so wanted to put the idea in people's heads in case other organizations in the movement want to help with it. I do want WMF to solve the larger infrastructure problems, but the more specialized tooling is likely _not_ going to be high on our agenda anytime soon. Thanks, Erik [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Report_on_requirements_for_usage_and_reuse_statistics_for_GLAM_content.pdf -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- *Jon Davies - Chief Executive Wikimedia UK*. Mobile (0044) 7803 505 169 tweet @jonatreesdavies Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). Telephone (0044) 207 065 0990. Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
Just as a quick update from WMCH - we are currently discussing our strategy/priorities for the 2015-20 cycle and yes, we plan to decide over the Summer whether we want to ramp up our development activities or not. We will, of course, keep you guys posted. 2014-06-26 10:29 GMT+02:00 Jon Davies jon.dav...@wikimedia.org.uk: Thanks Erik, This is certainly something we are keen to work on. I was talking to Magnus just last night and of course our experience with Europeana has taught us a lot )I hope we have fully learnt the messages!). We are undertaking a scoping review of our Development plans at the moment and this will be part of the consideration. Jon On 26 June 2014 04:54, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi folks, At the Zurich Hackathon, I met with a couple of folks from WM-CH who were interested in talking about ways that chapters can get involved in engineering/product development, similar to WM-DE's work on Wikidata. My recommendation to them was to consider working on GLAM-related tooling. This includes helping improve some of the reporting tools currently running in Labs (primarily developed by the illustrious and wonderful Magnus Manske in his spare time), but also meeting other requirements identified by the GLAM community [1] and potentially helping with the development of more complex MediaWiki-integrated tools like the GLAMWiki-Toolset. There's work that only WMF is well positioned to do (like feeding all media view data into Hadoop and providing generalized reports and APIs), but a lot of work in the aforementioned categories could be done by any chapter and could easily be scaled up from 1 to 2 to 3 FTEs and beyond as warranted. That's because a lot of the tools are separate from MediaWiki, so code review and integration requirements are lower, and it's easier for technically proficient folks to help. In short, I think this could provide a nice on-ramp for a chapter or chapters to support the work of volunteers in the cultural sector with appropriate technology. This availability of appropriate technology is clearly increasingly a distinguishing factor for Wikimedia relative to more commercial offerings in its appeal to the cultural sector. At the same time, WMF itself doesn't currently prioritize work with the cultural sector very highly, which I think is appropriate given all the other problems we have to solve. So if this kind of work has to compete for attention with much more basic improvements to say the uploading pipeline or the editing tools, it's going to lose. Therefore I think having a cultural tooling team or teams in the larger movement would be appropriate. I've not heard back from WM-CH yet on this, but I also don't think it's an exclusive suggestion, so wanted to put the idea in people's heads in case other organizations in the movement want to help with it. I do want WMF to solve the larger infrastructure problems, but the more specialized tooling is likely _not_ going to be high on our agenda anytime soon. Thanks, Erik [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Report_on_requirements_for_usage_and_reuse_statistics_for_GLAM_content.pdf -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- *Jon Davies - Chief Executive Wikimedia UK*. Mobile (0044) 7803 505 169 tweet @jonatreesdavies Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). Telephone (0044) 207 065 0990. Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/guidelineswikimedi...@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
Hi Erik, I would remember that in IEG or PEG there are several proposals of software development but every time these proposals don't offer a well defined approach to the maintenance. We know that maintenance is an important phase of the software development and it would be good to know if the software will be developed and will remain frozen at the last step or if there will be an idea to create at least a community around it in order to keep it updated and aligned with any future features that can come from the GLAM community, for instance. To maintain a software is not mandatory and the open license can assure that at least another one can take it in charge. Anyway a GLAM adopting a software can be really worried if this software becomes outdated, and this risk is higher if the change of this software can have a big impact, and probably the same reputation of the GLAM community can receive a worst reputation. I think that it should be important if some statements can come from the WMF about the consideration to take care about the *lifecycle* of the software considering also that this is a cost (and sometimes a higher cost in comparison with the other phases). I think that this may help also the IEG and/or the PEG committee to better evaluate a proposal. Regards On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 5:54 AM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi folks, At the Zurich Hackathon, I met with a couple of folks from WM-CH who were interested in talking about ways that chapters can get involved in engineering/product development, similar to WM-DE's work on Wikidata. My recommendation to them was to consider working on GLAM-related tooling. This includes helping improve some of the reporting tools currently running in Labs (primarily developed by the illustrious and wonderful Magnus Manske in his spare time), but also meeting other requirements identified by the GLAM community [1] and potentially helping with the development of more complex MediaWiki-integrated tools like the GLAMWiki-Toolset. There's work that only WMF is well positioned to do (like feeding all media view data into Hadoop and providing generalized reports and APIs), but a lot of work in the aforementioned categories could be done by any chapter and could easily be scaled up from 1 to 2 to 3 FTEs and beyond as warranted. That's because a lot of the tools are separate from MediaWiki, so code review and integration requirements are lower, and it's easier for technically proficient folks to help. In short, I think this could provide a nice on-ramp for a chapter or chapters to support the work of volunteers in the cultural sector with appropriate technology. This availability of appropriate technology is clearly increasingly a distinguishing factor for Wikimedia relative to more commercial offerings in its appeal to the cultural sector. At the same time, WMF itself doesn't currently prioritize work with the cultural sector very highly, which I think is appropriate given all the other problems we have to solve. So if this kind of work has to compete for attention with much more basic improvements to say the uploading pipeline or the editing tools, it's going to lose. Therefore I think having a cultural tooling team or teams in the larger movement would be appropriate. I've not heard back from WM-CH yet on this, but I also don't think it's an exclusive suggestion, so wanted to put the idea in people's heads in case other organizations in the movement want to help with it. I do want WMF to solve the larger infrastructure problems, but the more specialized tooling is likely _not_ going to be high on our agenda anytime soon. Thanks, Erik [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Report_on_requirements_for_usage_and_reuse_statistics_for_GLAM_content.pdf -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- Ilario Valdelli Wikimedia CH Verein zur Förderung Freien Wissens Association pour l’avancement des connaissances libre Associazione per il sostegno alla conoscenza libera Switzerland - 8008 Zürich Wikipedia: Ilario https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Ilario Facebook: Ilario Valdelli https://www.facebook.com/ivaldelli Twitter: Ilario Valdelli https://twitter.com/ilariovaldelli Linkedin: Ilario Valdelli http://www.linkedin.com/profile/view?id=6724469 Tel: +41764821371 http://www.wikimedia.ch ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l,
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
Dear Erik, (Also copying in the Cultural Partners and GLAMwiki Toolset mailing lists as Erik's email below is directly is related to them). Thank you for this email with the explicit invitation for groups in the Wikimedia movement to directly take responsibility for supporting the technology needs of GLAM partnerships. Different groups in the movement have different capacities and different areas of priority - and that is how it should be :-) We each need to try and 'bite off what we can chew' in a way that is coordinated, mutually beneficial, and not a duplication of each others' efforts. To that end... Over the last couple of years *Europeana*[1] has been increasingly involved in supporting tech development for mediawiki that is specifically targeted at addressing the needs of the GLAMwiki community. I note that the report you linked to on the stats that GLAMs want[1] and also the GLAMwiki Toolset for mass multimedia upload which you also mentioned[2] are both *Europeana* projects - in collaboration with several European Wikimedia Chapters. On behalf of *Europeana *I would like to confirm that we wish to become even more involved in this area and has the full intention of supporting further development in partnership with interested Chapters when possible. In the fullness of time, we intend to apply for a WMF grant in order to enable precisely that. On the mediawiki.org discussion page for the 2014/15 Engineering goals there has been a fair bit of discussion about GLAM-related projects that are not in the WMF's own plans[4]. Fabrice, as process owner for the Multimedia section of those goals, has proposed on that talkpage a couple of meetings of interested parties to discuss how we can all work together effectively on this, notably in person at Wikimania, an offer which we definitely accept :-) I also agree with Illario's point that formalising WMF support for externally-developed software is an important criteria in any grant decisions and for organisational reputation. Fortunately Fabrice has specifically addressed this issue relating specifically to the GLAMwiki Toolset which is very helpful.[5] Sincerely, Liam / Wittylama GLAMWIKI coordinator, Europeana. [1] http://pro.europeana.eu/ [2] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia /commons/a/a2/Report_on_requirements_for_usage_and_reuse_statistics_for_GLAM_content. pdf [3] https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Commons:GLAMwiki_Toolset_Project [4] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia _Engineering/2014-15_Goals#Image_view_analytics [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Engineering/2014-15_Goals# GLAMwiki_Toolset wittylama.com Peace, love metadata On 26 June 2014 05:54, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi folks, At the Zurich Hackathon, I met with a couple of folks from WM-CH who were interested in talking about ways that chapters can get involved in engineering/product development, similar to WM-DE's work on Wikidata. My recommendation to them was to consider working on GLAM-related tooling. This includes helping improve some of the reporting tools currently running in Labs (primarily developed by the illustrious and wonderful Magnus Manske in his spare time), but also meeting other requirements identified by the GLAM community [1] and potentially helping with the development of more complex MediaWiki-integrated tools like the GLAMWiki-Toolset. There's work that only WMF is well positioned to do (like feeding all media view data into Hadoop and providing generalized reports and APIs), but a lot of work in the aforementioned categories could be done by any chapter and could easily be scaled up from 1 to 2 to 3 FTEs and beyond as warranted. That's because a lot of the tools are separate from MediaWiki, so code review and integration requirements are lower, and it's easier for technically proficient folks to help. In short, I think this could provide a nice on-ramp for a chapter or chapters to support the work of volunteers in the cultural sector with appropriate technology. This availability of appropriate technology is clearly increasingly a distinguishing factor for Wikimedia relative to more commercial offerings in its appeal to the cultural sector. At the same time, WMF itself doesn't currently prioritize work with the cultural sector very highly, which I think is appropriate given all the other problems we have to solve. So if this kind of work has to compete for attention with much more basic improvements to say the uploading pipeline or the editing tools, it's going to lose. Therefore I think having a cultural tooling team or teams in the larger movement would be appropriate. I've not heard back from WM-CH yet on this, but I also don't think it's an exclusive suggestion, so wanted to put the idea in people's heads in case other organizations in the movement want to help with it. I do want WMF to solve the larger infrastructure problems, but the more specialized tooling is
Re: [Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
Erik (and others), is there any coordination page where groups could place, take, or discuss requests for development or requests for maintenance? I saw often that sometimes the hard-to-achieve consensus is found, but there is no way to evaluate the idea further. What now happens is: - several development proposals materialize through different channels (community, user groups, idea lab, RFCs, etc) - there is a general consensus about project A - limbo or an IEG, but as Ilario says, that doesn't guarantee its future viability or integration with current or planned workflows, or availability of resources for maintenance It would be more rational to have a further step in the pipeline where development ideas could be commented, shot down, or approved for further commitment by the ones who actually can understand how they fit in the broader product management/life-cycle context (engineering? PMs? chapters?). There are often community ideas that on first sight look great, but when you think about the potential problems, implications, costs, or stepping on the toes of other developments, that it is more rational not to start them or delay them until certain conditions are met. But no voice is heard, and that causes frustration and a sense of disconnection in the community, when just a single statement this shouldn't be done because X, would make everyone more aware of the limits. And the opposite too, when some idea gather community support and is green-lighted for further commitment, that would make chapters or other organizations more confident about what is wanted and how. Micru On Thu, Jun 26, 2014 at 5:54 AM, Erik Moeller e...@wikimedia.org wrote: Hi folks, At the Zurich Hackathon, I met with a couple of folks from WM-CH who were interested in talking about ways that chapters can get involved in engineering/product development, similar to WM-DE's work on Wikidata. My recommendation to them was to consider working on GLAM-related tooling. This includes helping improve some of the reporting tools currently running in Labs (primarily developed by the illustrious and wonderful Magnus Manske in his spare time), but also meeting other requirements identified by the GLAM community [1] and potentially helping with the development of more complex MediaWiki-integrated tools like the GLAMWiki-Toolset. There's work that only WMF is well positioned to do (like feeding all media view data into Hadoop and providing generalized reports and APIs), but a lot of work in the aforementioned categories could be done by any chapter and could easily be scaled up from 1 to 2 to 3 FTEs and beyond as warranted. That's because a lot of the tools are separate from MediaWiki, so code review and integration requirements are lower, and it's easier for technically proficient folks to help. In short, I think this could provide a nice on-ramp for a chapter or chapters to support the work of volunteers in the cultural sector with appropriate technology. This availability of appropriate technology is clearly increasingly a distinguishing factor for Wikimedia relative to more commercial offerings in its appeal to the cultural sector. At the same time, WMF itself doesn't currently prioritize work with the cultural sector very highly, which I think is appropriate given all the other problems we have to solve. So if this kind of work has to compete for attention with much more basic improvements to say the uploading pipeline or the editing tools, it's going to lose. Therefore I think having a cultural tooling team or teams in the larger movement would be appropriate. I've not heard back from WM-CH yet on this, but I also don't think it's an exclusive suggestion, so wanted to put the idea in people's heads in case other organizations in the movement want to help with it. I do want WMF to solve the larger infrastructure problems, but the more specialized tooling is likely _not_ going to be high on our agenda anytime soon. Thanks, Erik [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Report_on_requirements_for_usage_and_reuse_statistics_for_GLAM_content.pdf -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe -- Etiamsi omnes, ego non ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
[Wikimedia-l] Chapters and GLAM tooling
Hi folks, At the Zurich Hackathon, I met with a couple of folks from WM-CH who were interested in talking about ways that chapters can get involved in engineering/product development, similar to WM-DE's work on Wikidata. My recommendation to them was to consider working on GLAM-related tooling. This includes helping improve some of the reporting tools currently running in Labs (primarily developed by the illustrious and wonderful Magnus Manske in his spare time), but also meeting other requirements identified by the GLAM community [1] and potentially helping with the development of more complex MediaWiki-integrated tools like the GLAMWiki-Toolset. There's work that only WMF is well positioned to do (like feeding all media view data into Hadoop and providing generalized reports and APIs), but a lot of work in the aforementioned categories could be done by any chapter and could easily be scaled up from 1 to 2 to 3 FTEs and beyond as warranted. That's because a lot of the tools are separate from MediaWiki, so code review and integration requirements are lower, and it's easier for technically proficient folks to help. In short, I think this could provide a nice on-ramp for a chapter or chapters to support the work of volunteers in the cultural sector with appropriate technology. This availability of appropriate technology is clearly increasingly a distinguishing factor for Wikimedia relative to more commercial offerings in its appeal to the cultural sector. At the same time, WMF itself doesn't currently prioritize work with the cultural sector very highly, which I think is appropriate given all the other problems we have to solve. So if this kind of work has to compete for attention with much more basic improvements to say the uploading pipeline or the editing tools, it's going to lose. Therefore I think having a cultural tooling team or teams in the larger movement would be appropriate. I've not heard back from WM-CH yet on this, but I also don't think it's an exclusive suggestion, so wanted to put the idea in people's heads in case other organizations in the movement want to help with it. I do want WMF to solve the larger infrastructure problems, but the more specialized tooling is likely _not_ going to be high on our agenda anytime soon. Thanks, Erik [1] https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Report_on_requirements_for_usage_and_reuse_statistics_for_GLAM_content.pdf -- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation ___ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe