On 3 July 2014 19:16, Gregory Varnum gregory.varnum@gmail.com wrote:
That all seems logical, appropriate, and aligned with our current procedures. So..what's the problem?
Left hand not talking to the right hand I think.
I was gobsmacked to find that the reflinks tool had not been carefully transitioned and no plan for it was in place, considering how much time was available to discuss this. It is one of the more brilliant tools for productive Wikipedians. I used to use it all the time and without it will happily leave bare URLs in references as these used to be handled rather well without wasting my volunteer time hacking around filling in parameters of the template and my assumption is that one way, or another, this sort of service will become available again. The ball was definitely dropped on this one.
The way forward is clearly to identify the requirements for the specific tools. Hosting on WMFlabs can have any rules that the WMF thinks are sensible, but this is not the only way of hosting a tool if the policies don't fit, especially if the intention is to get something back up and working in an interim state, while people debate its future in the background.
The concepts are not that complex that volunteers or paid developers could not put together an open source alternative fairly quickly, given sufficient motivation. A discussion that could have been had a year ago with the user community.
Fae