Hello everyone, sorry for cross-posting.
What does your participation on the Wikimedia projects look like? Do you edit articles? Upload files? Patrol vandalism? Translate articles? Translate interface messages? Do you organize people, online or offline? Do you train new editors, or new trainers? Do you write code?
There are many different ways to contribute to Wikimedia – more than you would expect just from reading Wikipedia articles. With many kinds of contributions there are many tools you can use, most of which have been developed by our volunteer community. But do you know how to find these tools?
Since January the Wikimedia Cloud Services team at the Wikimedia Foundation has been meeting with contributors, organizers, and tool developers to learn more about the role tools play in our communities' work. We have also been researching existing methods for organizing lists of tools – at least 14 of them, including popular tool catalogs like Hay's Tool Directory.[0] With this research, we hope to figure out how best to put the right tools in front of the right people.
For this, we need your help. We have a page on Meta summarizing our current work,[1] as well as a proposed data model for describing tools.[2] Consider what work you currently do, whether you contribute content, code, organizing support, what have you – and ask: if there was a tool you needed to complete a certain task, would you know where to look? How would you look for it? Please look over [1] and [2] and let us know what you think. Feedback is welcome in any language. If you would like to get in touch privately, you are also welcome to email me at jhare@wikimedia.org.
Best regards, James Hare
[0] https://tools.wmflabs.org/hay/directory/ [1] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub [2] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Toolhub/Data_model
---- James Hare Associate Product Manager Wikimedia Foundation https://wikimediafoundation.org