It is definitely so sad to see those many abandoned tickets in Phabricator, like the ones Galder has been sharing along this thread. The same for the very interesting -and quite easy to implement- proposals that had lots of votes in the previous Community Wishlists but that never succeeded.

It is difficult to convince users in some Village Pumps to participate in the new Community Wishlists, as the improvements that we see do not relate much with many of the language-related needs. Not to mention what's going on with the sister projects: for Wikiquote or Wikibooks it has been crystal clear for the small communities that we are merely server-supported, without any other special, significant improvement foreseen nor for the past decade nor for the years to come. I feel often insulted when I see the "scary" banners to push people to donate in this small wiki projects -in which we barely can provide contents with an interface of 2008.

Necessary and valuable tech proposals for our poor infrastructure are completely left behind while the WMF is publishing press releases about a 120-million $ revenue. Meanwhile, some wikipedians increasingly take advantage of this big money as an opportunity to convert their hobby into a job by asking more and more grants in Meta to do paid-editing, WiRs or "cultural" projects (that before were fully succesfully volunteered-driven). Priorities and the consequences of having too much money.

Xavier Dengra

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‐‐‐‐‐‐‐ Original Message ‐‐‐‐‐‐‐
El dilluns, 3 de gener 2022 a les 9:44 PM, Galder Gonzalez Larrañaga <galder158@hotmail.com> va escriure:
I would like to be optimistic, but... https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T289101

2022(e)ko urt. 3(a) 15:28 erabiltzaileak hau idatzi du (Brion Vibber <bvibber@wikimedia.org>):
(Anyway I'm just grumping. I hear positive things about plans for this year and I'm heartened to see more folks involved in planning the next stages!)

-- brion

On Mon, Jan 3, 2022, 6:10 AM Brion Vibber <bvibber@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Thu, Dec 30, 2021, 10:27 AM Samuel Klein <meta.sj@gmail.com> wrote:
Separate thread.  I'm not sure which list is appropriate. 
... but not all the way to sentience.

The annual community wishlist survey (implemented by a small team, possibly in isolation?) may not be the mechanism for prioritizing large changes, but the latter also deserves a community-curated priority queue.  To complement the staff-maintained priorities in phab ~

For core challenges (like Commons stability and capacity), I'd be surprised if the bottleneck were people or budget. 

Currently there are zero people and no budget for multimedia, aside from whatever work I and others manage to get done here there. And I'm afraid I don't scale.

It's Wikimedia Foundation's job to assign budget and people here. I've been hoping for years that this will happen, and continue to hope.


-- brion

We do need a shared understanding of what issues are most important and most urgent, and how to solve them. For instance, a way to turn Amir's recent email about the problem (and related phab tickets) into a family of persistent, implementable specs and proposals and their articulated obstacles.

An issue tracker like phab is good for tracking the progress and dependencies of agreed-upon tasks, but weak for discussing what is important, what we know about it, how to address it. And weak for discussing ecosystem-design issues that are important and need persistent updating but don't have a simple checklist of steps.

So where is the best current place to discuss scaling Commons, and all that entails?  Some examples from recent discussions (most from the wm-l thread below):
- Uploads: Support for large file uploads / Keeping bulk upload tools online
- Video: Debugging + rolling out the videojs player
- Formats: Adding support for CML and dozens of other common high-demand file formats
- Thumbs: Updating thumbor and librsvg
- Search: WCQS still down, noauth option wanted for tools
- General: Finish implementing redesign of the image table

SJ

On Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 6:26 AM Amir Sarabadani <ladsgroup@gmail.com> wrote:
I'm not debating your note. It is very valid that we lack proper support for multimedia stack. I myself wrote a detailed rant on how broken it is [1] but three notes:
 - Fixing something like this takes time, you need to assign the budget for it (which means it has to be done during the annual planning) and if gets approved, you need to start it with the fiscal year (meaning July 2022) and then hire (meaning, write JD, do recruitment, interview lots of people, get them hired) which can take from several months to years. Once they are hired, you need to onboard them and let them learn about our technical infrastructure which takes at least two good months. Software engineering is not magic, it takes time, blood and sweat. [2]
 - Making another team focus on multimedia requires changes in planning, budget, OKR, etc. etc. Are we sure moving the focus of teams is a good idea? Most teams are already focusing on vital parts of wikimedia and changing the focus will turn this into a whack-a-mole game where we fix multimedia but now we have critical issues in security or performance.
 - Voting Wishlist survey is a good band-aid in the meantime. To at least address the worst parts for now.

I don't understand your point tbh, either you think it's a good idea to make requests for improvements in multimedia in the wishlist survey or you think it's not. If you think it's not, then it's offtopic to this thread.

[2] There is a classic book in this topic called "The Mythical Man-month"

On Wed, Dec 29, 2021 at 11:41 AM Gnangarra <gnangarra@gmail.com> wrote:
we have to vote for regular maintenance and support for essential functions like uploading files which is the core mission of Wikimedia Commons
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