Hi folks,

please spread the word! From July 1, tools which haven't been migrated from toolserver to tool labs yet, will stop working.

About one year ago, we, Wikimedia Deutschland e. V., announced June 30th as the deadline of the Toolserver migration (Roadmap at [1]). This deadline is approaching. The Toolserver will stop working on June 30th. What will happen afterwards?

Background information

The Toolserver is a community based infrastructure that hosts software supporting Wikipedia and its sister projects. Over the years many active volunteers have developed helpful and great software tools that are running on several Wikimedia projects.

The Toolserver is operated by Wikimedia Deutschland with assistance from the Wikimedia Foundation and several chapters. For many reasons, the Toolserver will be discontinued and replaced by Tool Labs [2], a platform operated by the Wikimedia Foundation. Please see the reasons at [3]. For more than one year Wikimedia Deutschland has been coordinating the migration of software tools from Toolserver to Tool Labs.

What editors should know

The toolserver is a community-driven project. The tools shall be migrated by the developers resp. maintainers themselves. Many of them have already migrated their tools or have indicated that they will do so before the end of this month. We have a special agreement with the OpenStreetMap projects and with the developer of Merlbot [4] to ensure these tools don’t stop working. All other tools will stop working by July 1st.

What editors can do

On Tool Labs [2], you can look up if the tools that you use and need have already moved there.

 Talk to the developers of your favourite tools: It is important to let them know how much you appreciate their tools and that you need them to do your work.

Contact us if you don’t know who these developers are or if you have any questions or if you want us to forward wishes or requests to tool developers. Contact information is given at the end of this text.

Information for tool developers

If you are still facing the migration of your tools, please keep in mind that lots of people use your tools. They are a great support for their daily work and will be missed when they fail. Please take the time to migrate them or poke us: WMDE can still support you during migration - what we can’t do is maintain abandoned tools in the long run.

From July 1st on, the toolserver admins will still hand you over your backups upon request and create redirects to Tool Labs for you. You won’t be able to log in to the toolserver anymore though.

If anyone wants to have and reuse other people’s code, we recommend to seek approval from them directly, even if from a legal point of view there is no problem. Don’t hesitate to talk to us if you need a contact person.

Here is a collection of the relevant links for you again:

Tool Labs: http://tools.wmflabs.org

Tool Labs help pages: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nova_Resource:Tools/Help

How to create redirects to Tool Labs: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/.htaccess#.htaccess

Magnus Manske’s migration manual: https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Magnus_Manske/Migrating_from_toolserver

Scripts to clean up your toolserver account]] after migration: https://wiki.toolserver.org/view/Main_Page

Mailing list Labs-l: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/labs-l

IRC channel #wikimedia-labs: http://webchat.freenode.net/?channels=#wikimedia-labs

Marc-André Pelletier (Coren) and Andrew Bogott (andrewbogott) are the WMF Tool Labs ops. Petr Bena (petan) and Tim Landscheidt (scfc_de) are voluntary Tool Labs admins.

We invite you to join our IRC office hour in #wikimedia-office on Wednesday, June 11th, at 5 p.m. UTC.

Contact:

The migration is coordinated by Silke Meyer (WMDE). Birgit Müller supports her in communications. The two toolserver admins Marlen Caemmerer und Alexander Mette are glad to help you with advice. Marc-André Pelletier can answer all questions concerning Tool Labs. Contact us at

Silke: silke.meyer@wikimedia.de, Talk page at [5], IRC: Silke_WMDE

Birgit: birgit.mueller@wikimedia.de, Talk page at [6], IRC: Birgit_WMDE

We hope that the transition will happen as smoothly as possible!

[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Tool_Labs/Roadmap_en

[2] http://tools.wmflabs.org

[3] https://toolserver.org/

[4] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer:MerlBot

[5] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer_Diskussion:Silke_WMDE

[6] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Benutzer_Diskussion:Birgit_Müller_(WMDE)