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
Kaya Albin
As a regular user of Pattypan, in fact its only 24 hours since I last used it to upload some more photos from Wikimania. I'd like to thank you for your efforts and I appreciate the work you have put into this tool and Commonist before that. Yes Commons is in dire need of some real love from the WMF.
Hopefully version 22.03 will continue to be functional for a while longer.
Thank you again, its something thats not said enough to people who do the important things out of sight
On Thu, 21 Sept 2023 at 21:34, Albin Larsson albin.post@gmail.com wrote:
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 _______________________________________________ GLAM mailing list -- glam@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to glam-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Hi all!
Since Wikimedia Sverige’s actions are directly pointed out as the cause above I feel the need to reply to that part in order to give our view on events.
We took on building the stand-alone .EXE functionality only once you had made it clear that you were not interested in taking on this commission, and over email in September 2022 asked us to work on it. In no way have we wanted to take advantage or misrepresent you, and it pains me that you seem to think that.
We communicated on our implementation of this both on GitHub (issuehttps://github.com/yarl/pattypan/issues/152#issuecomment-1361324110 and PRhttps://github.com/yarl/pattypan/pull/173) and on Phabricator. We got feedback from you back in spring about our implementation but have not gotten any replies to our questions since then. We interpreted your silence as you not wishing to merge our solution, a decision which we respect. To ensure it could still be of use to those who wish to use it (incl. the GLAM that commissioned it) we therefore host it separately and take on the task of manually syncing it to newer releases of Pattypan. In no way should that be considered to entail a fork of Pattypan, but rather just an independently maintained download version for some Windows users (i.e. just a binary).
Our changes to Commons:Pattypan were intended to be minimal to inform users that this new functionality was available without adding any bloat to the page or trying to supplant any official links. While I didn’t believe it to be necessary at the time I can see now that we could have made it more clear that the .EXE distribution was inofficial/independent.
That said…
While it saddens me to see you stepping down I can fully understand your reasons for doing so. Maintenance is a largely thankless task, not made easier if it is someone else's codebase you have inherited or if it interfaces with services that keep changing.
Thank you for keeping Pattypan alive these last 5 years! Doing so has enabled countless uploads, the lion's share of which would likely never have made it to Commons without your work.
I’d also like to thank you for clearly communicating that you are stepping down. All too often maintainers quietly quit, leaving the users in limbo. This happens independently of if it is an individual or an organization maintaining the software. Your example will hopefully make it easier for someone else finding themselves in a similar position.
If you find it valuable I would be happy to talk with you and see how to best move forward from here, as I assume that we will have interactions about Wikimedia related things in the future.
With respect,
André Costa (WMSE) / Lokal_Profil
Kaya
Thank you for the other side of the story.
Outcome is a tool was modified at the behest and funding of one GLAM, I have no issue with GLAMs funding tool development, and appreciate there is a dire need to do so. They are happy and maybe it might help others. This whole thing failed because Pattypan wasnt a tool used by one glam, or even one community; it is being used globally by many different communities and individuals. Now Commons has yet another tool not being maintained; the whole community will be worse for it. Talking on Github[?] or even in Phabricator just doesn't make any sense when there is a whole project(which by the way serves every project) its global user base relying on the goodwill and efforts of volunteers.
Some of the concerns could have been solved by a simple message to the Commons community the explain what is happening, how this tool has been changed and any impacts on the future of pattypan
The question is how is this going to be fixed, who is going to take responsibility for Pattypan fixing any bugs and upgrading it as needed.
On Fri, 22 Sept 2023 at 21:05, andre.costa@wikimedia.se wrote:
Hi all!
Since Wikimedia Sverige’s actions are directly pointed out as the cause above I feel the need to reply to that part in order to give our view on events.
We took on building the stand-alone .EXE functionality only once you had made it clear that you were not interested in taking on this commission, and over email in September 2022 asked us to work on it. In no way have we wanted to take advantage or misrepresent you, and it pains me that you seem to think that.
We communicated on our implementation of this both on GitHub (issue< https://github.com/yarl/pattypan/issues/152#issuecomment-1361324110%3E and PRhttps://github.com/yarl/pattypan/pull/173) and on Phabricator. We got feedback from you back in spring about our implementation but have not gotten any replies to our questions since then. We interpreted your silence as you not wishing to merge our solution, a decision which we respect. To ensure it could still be of use to those who wish to use it (incl. the GLAM that commissioned it) we therefore host it separately and take on the task of manually syncing it to newer releases of Pattypan. In no way should that be considered to entail a fork of Pattypan, but rather just an independently maintained download version for some Windows users (i.e. just a binary).
Our changes to Commons:Pattypan were intended to be minimal to inform users that this new functionality was available without adding any bloat to the page or trying to supplant any official links. While I didn’t believe it to be necessary at the time I can see now that we could have made it more clear that the .EXE distribution was inofficial/independent.
That said…
While it saddens me to see you stepping down I can fully understand your reasons for doing so. Maintenance is a largely thankless task, not made easier if it is someone else's codebase you have inherited or if it interfaces with services that keep changing.
Thank you for keeping Pattypan alive these last 5 years! Doing so has enabled countless uploads, the lion's share of which would likely never have made it to Commons without your work.
I’d also like to thank you for clearly communicating that you are stepping down. All too often maintainers quietly quit, leaving the users in limbo. This happens independently of if it is an individual or an organization maintaining the software. Your example will hopefully make it easier for someone else finding themselves in a similar position.
If you find it valuable I would be happy to talk with you and see how to best move forward from here, as I assume that we will have interactions about Wikimedia related things in the future.
With respect,
André Costa (WMSE) / Lokal_Profil _______________________________________________ GLAM mailing list -- glam@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to glam-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
Hi all,
We took on building the stand-alone .EXE functionality only once you had
made it clear that you were not interested in taking on this commission, and over email in September 2022 asked us to work on it. In no way have we wanted to take advantage or misrepresent you, and it pains me that you seem to think that.
The fact that WMSE took this on is only awesome and I have supported that all along. At the only point in which I feeled misrepresented, WMSE concluded I had been and unpublished the blog post in question.
We communicated on our implementation of this both on GitHub (issue<
https://github.com/yarl/pattypan/issues/152#issuecomment-1361324110%3E and PR< https://github.com/yarl/pattypan/pull/173%3E) and on Phabricator.
This just illustrates my point. A quick look at the progress report reveals that rather than collaborating and being transparent with the project WMSE moved all decision making and underlying research to its own spaces over at Phabricator. Since the pull request reached Pattypan WMSE hasn't worked on its implementation at all.
We got feedback from you back in spring about our implementation but have
not gotten any replies to our questions since then.
If someone decides to abandon work on a patch it will take months for someone else to pick it up, that's how open source works. All the unanswered questions are asking me if I have had the time to look at a solution on my own.
To ensure it could still be of use to those who wish to use it (incl. the
GLAM that commissioned it) we therefore host it separately and take on the task of manually syncing it to newer releases of Pattypan. In no way should that be considered to entail a fork of Pattypan, but rather just an independently maintained download version for some Windows users (i.e. just a binary).
WMSE's "independently maintained download version" still points to Pattypan for support, it uses the same version-identifier as the official version, etc. Even though the project would have no ability to support this "version" given that it's "just a binary". No one involved in Pattypan was even informed.
WMSE shouldn't have done this in the first place, it's a well known no-no in open source, they should have either finished the work started or at least communicated a wish to find an alternative solution. Several solutions come to my mind directly.
Just like posting blog posts about maintainers' inabilities is abusive, bypassing community/open source processes is abusive too. I'm not sure what points WMSE is trying to score with these actions?
Albin
On Fri, Sep 22, 2023 at 3:05 PM andre.costa@wikimedia.se wrote:
Hi all!
Since Wikimedia Sverige’s actions are directly pointed out as the cause above I feel the need to reply to that part in order to give our view on events.
We took on building the stand-alone .EXE functionality only once you had made it clear that you were not interested in taking on this commission, and over email in September 2022 asked us to work on it. In no way have we wanted to take advantage or misrepresent you, and it pains me that you seem to think that.
We communicated on our implementation of this both on GitHub (issue< https://github.com/yarl/pattypan/issues/152#issuecomment-1361324110%3E and PRhttps://github.com/yarl/pattypan/pull/173) and on Phabricator. We got feedback from you back in spring about our implementation but have not gotten any replies to our questions since then. We interpreted your silence as you not wishing to merge our solution, a decision which we respect. To ensure it could still be of use to those who wish to use it (incl. the GLAM that commissioned it) we therefore host it separately and take on the task of manually syncing it to newer releases of Pattypan. In no way should that be considered to entail a fork of Pattypan, but rather just an independently maintained download version for some Windows users (i.e. just a binary).
Our changes to Commons:Pattypan were intended to be minimal to inform users that this new functionality was available without adding any bloat to the page or trying to supplant any official links. While I didn’t believe it to be necessary at the time I can see now that we could have made it more clear that the .EXE distribution was inofficial/independent.
That said…
While it saddens me to see you stepping down I can fully understand your reasons for doing so. Maintenance is a largely thankless task, not made easier if it is someone else's codebase you have inherited or if it interfaces with services that keep changing.
Thank you for keeping Pattypan alive these last 5 years! Doing so has enabled countless uploads, the lion's share of which would likely never have made it to Commons without your work.
I’d also like to thank you for clearly communicating that you are stepping down. All too often maintainers quietly quit, leaving the users in limbo. This happens independently of if it is an individual or an organization maintaining the software. Your example will hopefully make it easier for someone else finding themselves in a similar position.
If you find it valuable I would be happy to talk with you and see how to best move forward from here, as I assume that we will have interactions about Wikimedia related things in the future.
With respect,
André Costa (WMSE) / Lokal_Profil _______________________________________________ GLAM mailing list -- glam@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to glam-leave@lists.wikimedia.org