> The major difference from our perspective is how applications for new > accounts would be handled. Our idea is to be able to hand out > accounts based around the likelihood of effective research, rather > than on visibility within Wikipedia, or on the usefulness of the > resulting tool to the larger Wikipedia community. The latter two > cases are already handled well by the existing toolserver and its > application process. Accounts on the research toolserver would be > approved based on the quality of the research ideas, and the ability > of the proposing team to carry out the research. > > The research toolserver would need a more transparent decision-making > process for approving accounts. The basis for decisions should be > clear to applicants so they're able to write better applications, and > denied applications should be returned with feedback about why the > decision was made. > > What do you think? Seem like a useful idea if we can find sufficient > resources, and put together a management plan?
If the only problem solved by setting up a dedicated research cluster is that of the account approval system, then by all means lets fix the system on the toolserver, and keep things together. Apart from the fact that full database replication to a third party system is very unlikely to happen for legal reasons, it would be a waste of hardware and effort. For a system with a very much different focus, such as text crunching, a separate cluster seems worth considering, even though I'd of course prefer to have everything available to "our" users. But a second system with a spec very similar to ours (live replicated meta data) seems wasteful, even if replication was technically and legally feasible. Let's try to fix the problems of the current toolserver, starting with the application process and continuing with a plan for on how research projects could contribute to the hardware platform and infrastructure software. As to the approval policy: research projects are usually approved, if their resource requirements are not too steep. Utility to the wikimedia user community is only one factor that is considered, it's not required for research projects. Making the process more transparent and giving feedback more swiftly is indeed something we should work on. In fact, I will try to set aside a fixed amount of working time for this. -- daniel _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
