Hi All,
We are happy to announce the launch of Toolhub – a community-authored catalogue that aims to make software tools used in the Wikimedia movement discoverable to everyone.
Community developed tools – including web applications, bots, gadgets, user scripts, lua modules, and more – play a significant role in the Wikimedia projects. These software applications address a wide range of use cases including finding bad faith edits and other content curation, bulk editing, collecting statistical information, creating special citations, and much more. About ⅓ of all edits are made by bots and tools. In addition, semi-automated edits are helped by user scripts, gadgets, and other editing assistance tools that run from the user's local computer or directly inside the wikis. There are thousands of tools available, but how can you find them?
With Toolhub, you can document and find tools, promote their use in your wiki community, and help improve them by contributing data. You can create and share lists of tools relevant to your work - for example, for GLAM tools, or for wiki projects such as Women in Red.
This first release provides a core set of functionalities, and contains an initial data set of about 1500 tools. Most of the initial tools in the catalog are imported from the same data files developers have created for Hay's Directory which has been a major inspiration for Toolhub.
Toolhub serves developers and users of tools alike. It is part of our efforts to improve the infrastructure and services for technical contributors, captured under one of Technology’s top level objectives in the FY 2020-2021 and 2021-2022 annual plans: Tech Community Building. We hope to continue conversations with developers and users of tools, plan to improve Toolhub, and to further expand the functionality.
A collaborative system and open developer platform
Toolhub is built as an API driven platform that makes it possible to extend and remix the catalogue, and to make collecting and reusing information about tools as open and collaborative as we can. Everything that can be done interactively with the Toolhub website can also be done remotely through the API. We would love to hear from technical contributors interested in using the Toolhub API to build new tools that make new ways to add or consume information from Toolhub's catalog.
Our decision record and weekly progress reports on Meta provide more insights in technical implementation details and decisions made throughout the development process. The Toolhub/About page provides information on project origin, research, use cases, data model, and roadmap. This recording from a lightning talk at ‘21 Wikimania gives an overview of the main aspects in 10 minutes.
Thank you <3
This project wouldn’t have been possible without the support, knowledge, ideas and prior work of many. One of the nicest side-effects of a release is that it’s a great opportunity to thank folks for their time and contributions :-)
Husky, whose Hay's Directory provided the foundation for the data model used by Toolhub and inspired some of its features.
Harej, for his invaluable contributions in the early stages of the Toolhub project.
Our 'advisory board' - Giuseppe (SRE), Risker (editor, admin), Reedy (Security), Keegan (Community Relations), and Eran (volunteer developer & RTL expert) for providing their perspectives on key questions throughout the development process.
Giuseppe, Kunal, Manuel, Effie, Cole and Emanuele from SRE and Majavah for their help on finding and resolving deployment issues.
Dan and Jeena from Release Engineering for help with build tooling.
Guillaume and the rest of the Search Platform team for supporting our search index needs.
Manuel for supporting our database needs.
Niklas and the whole translatewiki.net community for help with localization and internationalization.
Rita, Olga, Alex, and Matthew from the Product Design team for their feedback on the Toolhub user interface.
Scott from the Security team for our security readiness review.
Amire, Kunal, Eran, Reedy, and Dan for contributing code to the project.
Ricordisamoa, Quim, and the people participating in conversations on wikitech-l for T115650 which inspired this whole project.
Finally, a huge thanks to all the folks who gave input and feedback on the talk page, in Phabricator, and at sessions - this is really appreciated!
We hope that this new resource will be fun to explore, inspire you with new ideas, and ultimately be useful for your work.
Feedback, bug reports, ideas and questions are more than welcome on the talk page of the project, or in Phabricator. Bryan (tech lead) & Seve (our new Product Manager) will be there to chat with interested folks and help with any questions. We are looking forward to evolving this project step-by-step and jointly with everyone!
Birgit – on behalf of Technical Engagement & our Toolhub project team