Hello Nouill!

Thanks for reaching out!

With the tools that are on Tool Labs, the responsibility for maintenance is on the person who wrote the tool and put it on Tool Labs. For that, you can look at https://tools.wmflabs.org/. In this case, you can see that the people that wrote that tool are Magnus Manske and Kolossos. In the first instance, those would be the best people to reach out to with questions about it. There is a Labs Team https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors#Labs at the Wikimedia Foundation, but their responsibility is maintaining the labs infrastructure.

In the case of maps, the Discovery Department currently has a Maps Team https://wikimediafoundation.org/wiki/Staff_and_contractors#Maps which is working on maps-related tasks. Our goal https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Engineering/2015-16_Q1_Goals#Maps_.26_Geo is to, by the end of September, deploy a new tile service to production which will be more robust and reliable than the existing services like GeoHack which are deployed to Labs. This will allow volunteer developers, like those that built GeoHack, to build more stable and appealing features. The Discovery Department has no plans to maintain GeoHack ourselves.

Hopefully this answers your query. Let me know if you have any further questions.

Thanks, Dan

On 19 July 2015 at 07:26, Nou Nouill nounouill@gmail.com wrote:

Hi !

So today Geohack don't work few hours, once gain. It has been many times that Geohack is down these last months (and years). The previous issue was linked with the Tools labs problems (but not today, Tools Labs was working).

In addition to that maintenance problem, I don't see Geohack evolve those last years. The tool have a old design. It has different configurations for each language, so when a user do translation, he has to adapt to each configuration. Moreover, in plenty of language, Geohack have long lists of hundred links, with lot of useless links, because languages communities want to describe exhaustively web mappings service. So the presentation of Geohack is often very weighed down.

For me, Geohack is the more useful tools on Tools Labs with a massive visibility for the viewers (each coordinate on WM use Geohack and there are several hundred thousands coordinates). Geohack is also use by contributors (when I translate a article with a coordinate, It's usually more practice to check coordinate in Geohack).

So, I want to ask if the Foundation have a plan to improve Geohack ? I have the impression when I see https://tools.wmflabs.org that Geohack was mainly maintain by volunteer, but for me Geohack is a core item of the Wikimedia sphere. So I don't understand that situation since few years. I hope it's the place to do this comment.

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Nou Nouill nounouill@gmail.com wrote:

[...]

So, I want to ask if the Foundation have a plan to improve Geohack ? I have the impression when I see https://tools.wmflabs.org that Geohack was mainly maintain by volunteer, but for me Geohack is a core item of the Wikimedia sphere. So I don't understand that situation since few years. I hope it's the place to do this comment.

There is a task about moving Geohack to production (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T102960; "Move geohack to production"). However in the WMF cluster there is also al- ready Extension:MapSources (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:MapSources) deployed on the Wikivoyage sites, so (IMHO) it is more use- ful to expand on that foundation.

The problems Geohack faced in the past (AFAICT) can be mostly attributed to failures in the Labs infrastructure, so moving the functionality to an ("internal") extension would improve the availability (or to put in another way: If Geo- hack/Extension:MapSources would /then/ fail, Wikipedia would be down as well :-)).

Tim