Erik Moeller wrote:
On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 7:16 AM, MZMcBride
<z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Labs is a playground and Galleries, Libraries,
Archives, and Museums are
serious enough to warrant a proper investment of resources, in my view.
Magnus and many others develop magnificent tools, but my sense is that
they're largely proofs of concept, not final implementations.
Far from being treated as mere proofs of concept, Magnus' GLAM tools
[1] have been used to measure and report success in the context of
project grant and annual plan proposals and reports, ongoing project
performance measurements, blog posts and press releases, etc. Daniel
Mietchen has, to my knowledge, been the main person doing any
systematic auditing or verification of the reports generated by these
tools, and results can be found in his tool testing reports, the last
one of which is unfortunately more than a year old. [2]
It's funny that you mention "This Month in GLAM" as my now-defunct bot
delivered its monthly newsletter for quite some time. The MassMessage
MediaWiki extension is a pretty great case study of exactly what I'm
discussing here: turning a proof-of-concept script into a supported and
maintained tool that's integrated with MediaWiki. :-)
While it's tedious to get an extension deployed, the (ideal) result is
that it has documentation, it's gone through series of review
(performance, security, architecture, and design) and we know where the
source code is and how to build it. That's not nothing!
Integration with MediaWiki should IMO not be viewed as
a runway that
all useful developments must be pushed towards. Rather, we should seek
to establish clearer criteria by which to decide that functionality
benefits from this level of integration, to such an extent that it
justifies the cost. Functionality that is not integrated in this
manner should, then, not be dismissed as "proofs of concept" but
rather judged on its own merits.
Sure, I agree with this in principle.
When I consider Labs (or Tool Labs), I think of the Toolserver:
<https://toolserver.org/~magnus/>.
My point was that GLAMs should be taken seriously. The Wikimedia
Foundation's historical track record with regard to GLAM support isn't
great. And from the perspective of these institutions, I continue to
believe that it makes sense to invest in long-term solutions, even if
they're more costly in terms of time and money.
Wikimedia DC has been hosting meet-ups at the National Archives lately.
The National Archives has been in the free content business a lot longer
than the Wikimedia Foundation, eh. ;-) They know that hacking together a
few scripts on Labs isn't going to integrate their enormous collection of
accumulated holdings that we want in our projects and that they want to
share with the world.
Labs _is_ a playground, just as the Toolserver was. Volunteers created
some incredible scripts and tools, but how many are still around today? I
maintained many scripts and bots for years, but eventually you lose
interest, you have other priorities, life moves on, and yet the need for
such tools has only grown.
As noted before, for tools like the ones used for GLAM
reporting to
get better, WMF has its role to play in providing more datasets and
improved infrastructure. But there's nothing inherent in the
development of those tools that forces them to live in production
land, or that requires large development teams to move them forward.
If these tools want to be around in five or ten years from now, then I
disagree. I've spent far too long watching far too many people walk away,
abandoning their previous pet projects. That's certainly their prerogative
as volunteers and I don't blame the Wikimedia Foundation or anyone else
for their departure, but that doesn't mean there's not a real issue here
in terms of creating lasting, sustainable software.
This isn't to say that every MediaWiki extension is some garden of Eden
where there's no code rot. But at least the current extension process
creates a much higher likelihood of long-term success than the
alternatives. I wouldn't be so quick to discount it.
MediaWiki _is_ the platform, in my view. I wonder: if we relabeled
MediaWiki extensions and started calling them apps, would it be easier to
sell everyone on the idea of the need for more of them?
- Improved software and infrastructure support for A/B
testing, possibly
including adoption of existing open source tooling such as Facebook's
PlanOut library/interpreter [14].
I'll split this out into a separate thread.
In general, the point of my original message was this:
All
organizations that seek to improve Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia
projects ultimately depend on technology to do so; to view WMF as the
sole "tech provider" does not scale. Larger, well-funded chapters can
take on big, hairy challenges like Wikidata; smaller, less-funded orgs
are better positioned to work on specialized technical support for
programmatic work.
Sure, I agree with this as well.
And thank you for laying out some of the work and progress that has been
made in the analytics area. It was a very interesting read, as was the
information about (among other things) improved graphs support.
I would caution against requesting WMF to work on
highly specialized
solutions for highly specialized problems.
Nobody is suggesting this. I'm all for both strictly evaluating the need
for new tools and for developing generalized solutions for maximum impact.
MZMcBride