My advice is take a break, get some sun, catch up with friends, relax and chill, then, when you feel the urge, start contributing in other ways. I have been contributing for 10+ years and I have found a wiki-break is necessary from time to time. Contributing when you are frustrated or angry is never a good thing.

Wishing you good health and happiness

Kerry (User:Kerry Raymond)



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 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

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