On Wed, Jul 9, 2014 at 1:01 PM, Dan Andreescu <dandreescu@wikimedia.org> wrote:
By the way, if this at all sounds like I'm proposing a "new" monster codebase, that is not at all the case.  Most of the hard problems will be out-sourced to promising projects.  Like Vega is in the top running to handle the visualizations themselves and the dashboarding around it will be very simplistic but solve problems we've encountered with Limn.  But again, very early days.

Yeah to be honest I'm pretty skeptical of such a plan. 

To back up... As a consumer of numerous dashboards and someone who has to decide when/how to request creation of them, I care about getting a readable new dashboard set up and maintained to run indefinitely with as little developer or researcher time as possible. 

The main problem with Limn is that to set up a suite of dashboards takes a very large initial investment. I'm not really sure how shoehorning a dashboard service on top of MediaWiki really solves this problem better than just setting up one of the many existing solutions out there. I don't care about transparent versioning and authentication, which seems to be the two things that MediaWiki is really good at in this context.  Building a custom tool from scratch is also part of what got us in this mess with Limn to begin with. 

--
Steven Walling,
Product Manager