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
>
>
>
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