TLDR: I (User:Abbe98) will no longer take responsibility for updating or
managing releases for Pattypan.
Hi everyone,
Since 2017, I have been contributing to the Pattypan uploading tool and for
the last few years I have managed releases and reviewed others’
contributions, in addition to common tasks like fixing bugs, providing
support, etc. Yesterday, Wikimedia Sverige (WMSE), without prior
communication, decided to fork Pattypan and edit its page on Commons to
link to their new distribution
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Commons:Pattypan&diff=prev&oldid=800593659>
instead of working to get their changes merged with the project.
As a result, users will now submit issues/bugs for a distribution, which I
or anyone else involved in the project before will not have any control
over or the ability to debug. This makes it for me personally impossible to
continue as a maintainer of Pattypan.
For the last two years, maintaining Pattypan has been a rather painful
experience. Starting with the API changes Wikimedia Foundation did in 2021,
which affected many batch upload tools (Commonist, Vicuña, etc.) and
resulted in a stream of upset/angry users coming my way. Private
information like my phone number has made it out there in public, and I
have even received legal threats. That event caused me to take a
several-month-long hiatus from Wikimedia software development, and my
contributions have yet to recover.
Once back, WMSE took advantage of the situation and published a blog post
following their help describing volunteers' inability to maintain these
tools. Given the audience of their post and my working situation, I had
them take down the blog post, given its potential harm to my reputation and
income.
Now, WMSE has been paid by a GLAM institution to make it easier to install
Pattypan Windows (that is awesome and not a task I would easily have taken
upon myself!). They, however, implemented their solution without input, and
once submitted to Pattypan, they haven’t addressed the issues that were
pointed out. Their solution depends on proprietary and paid services,
significantly affecting its maintainability. Given the scope and limited
capacity as a volunteer, I have yet to have the time to address these
shortcomings myself.
That takes us to yesterday when they decided without notice to provide
their distribution on Pattypans main wiki page, probably without realizing
the burden it will cause.
By putting a proper end to my commitment to maintaining Pattypan, I hope, I
can regain some of my motivation to work on other GLAM-related Wikimedia
projects (beyond the GLAM aspects of Live Wikidata Editing and my
involvement in Wiki Loves Monuments Sweden).
Many of you know that I would love to work on a user-friendly, no-install,
structured data batch upload tool and that I even keep a list of Commons
issues that would need to be resolved to make it happen on my end. I can’t
wait for Commons to get the love it deserves and to jump straight at the
task with all my learnings from Pattypan and other upload tools. Maybe one
day.
Albin / Abbe98