n 29 May 2014 15:43, Lila Tretikov <lila(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
We have deeper graphs. I want to be sensitive to our
product team's time,
but I am sure they will share when they can.
Hi Lila,
As well as WMF teams, there are quite a few volunteers about who pull
reports from the database or through the API and generate interesting
reports, tables and charts to support projects they are interested in.
For a bit of fun I manually generate this report of active Commons
contributors with more than 10,000 edits
<https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:F%C3%A6/Userlist>.
It might be an idea to think of how you can encourage unpaid
volunteers to try playing around with generating reports and creating
bots to maintain them so that, as a community, more volunteers can do
it themselves and produce test examples in an agile fashion, and
reduce the burden on WMF teams to respond to requests.
I find the labs, API and database user guides okay, but not easy, for
a non-technical person to work out what they need to do to get
started. Noting that the the API sandbox was a *great* well designed
feature to add to the wikis. In practice, as an older guy with a
technical but non-internet background, it took me nearly a year to
become not-too-terrible at doing bot-stuff (and I still have not got
around to working out how to run SQL queries via Python to the
Wikimedia database), for the very few contributors that are interested
in what happens behind the scenes, this is a tough barrier to
overcome. I have been asked to help with a workshop on GLAM related
automated uploading at Wikimania. I'm dreading it, as having tried
several times, I find it really hard to explain to another Wikimedia
how to go about this stuff in an understandable step by step fashion,
without listening to myself and realising how it awkwardly sounds like
explaining how to do a DNA analysis using kitchen tools from someone
who watches CSI but cannot remember the periodic table.
Fae
--
faewik(a)gmail.com
https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:Fae