On Feb 19, 2015, at 3:14 AM, Erik Moeller
<erik(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
2) I say "within the context of the current proposal", because I would ask you
to give serious consideration to the following question: Does GLAMWikiToolset need to
existing within MediaWiki? When it was first developed, we didn't have OAuth (so a
tool outside MediaWiki couldn't perform user actions), and our APIs were less mature.
Today we have many examples of external tools that are doing amazing things. Magnus'
tools have made tens of millions of edits to Wikidata. The Wiki Edu Foundation has created
wizard.wikiedu.org and
dashboard.wikiedu.org for managing student assignments and
courses.
I know we have GWT and so it seems natural to just fix bugs and improve it. But consider
the long term development velocity. GWT is used by a very small subset of Wikimedia users,
it's not "core site functionality" and does, as far as I can tell (I may be
missing something), not benefit dramatically from deep integration. You pay a lot of cost
for this integration without necessarily getting a lot of "bang for the buck".
I would wager that if you started over with a new external tool, applying all the lessons
learned so far and spending extra effort on UX, you could pretty quickly catch up with
current functionality and then would move at a faster velocity from there. Consider where
we want to be in 2016, 2018, 2020 -- is the strategy of maintaining a deeply integrated
MediaWiki extension for this really sustainable or desirable? I think it's at least
worth seriously considering the alternatives.
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Product & Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation
_______________________________________________
Glamtools mailing list
Glamtools(a)lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/glamtools
I'll be blunt: I will be using the toolset to upload millions of files. Taking that
into consideration: what kind of marginal cost are we looking at having an external tool
interfacing with the API instead of something built directly into the software? These are
media files, not byte-sized edits to Wikidata. Also, how is uploading files—even large
numbers of them—not a core function of a media repository?