I've always considered technical debt as analogous to the ongoing work required to maintain a house. That is, it's usually not possible to bring everything up to best standards at once. Priorities have to be established. We've already seen what large technical areas will get focused attention for the next year or two - and they're ones that are much more heavily used, much more critical to the function of the overall Wikimedia projects, than Special:Book, an extension that was mainly used only by (some) Wikimedians when it was fully functional. This is the correct priority. A volunteer could, if they were so motivated, spend some time on Special:Book, perhaps even get a grant to do so. But addressing the serious, mission-critical issues of Commons beats Special:Book every day of the week and twice on Sunday.

Generally speaking, issues involving security, system integrity and the functions used by the widest segment of our audience (which includes Wikimedians, of course), would logically be of higher priority than a useful but (comparatively) little used function. In another thread, there was mention of there being 50,000 "books" attached to English Wikipedia. We have individual images on Commons that probably have been used more often than that (although many of the uses may be by third parties).

Risker/Anne

On Tue, 19 Apr 2022 at 13:09, Benjamin Lees emufarmers@gmail.com wrote:

I don't think "slower budget growth" means spending less. It just means not spending as much more.

Anyway, you can spend more on one thing, such as technical debt, and less on other things.

On Tue, Apr 19, 2022 at 8:21 AM Gerard Meijssen gerard.meijssen@gmail.com wrote:

...

Hoi, In information I read the WMF intends to spend less. However, given that there is a huge technical debt in maintenance, including software that is currently not functional. I wonder why we intend to spend less when our technical house is not in order.

For just one example of technical debt .. Collection / Special:Book usage is broken.

So when will we address broken and missing functionality particularly when it is not Wikipedia? Thanks, GerardM

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Hoi, How do you compare functionality that is totally broken with "another tool". Or is your tool broken as well?

As to Commons, we once had a Wikidata provided search tool that allowed search in any language. It was "adopted" by general search and is now no longer functional. In essence it provided a service where an eight year old could find pictures in any language. When asked if the functionality could be revived, the answer was "that is not our mission".

What we see is another type of bias. It is the bias that comes with the highest usage. It is not considered why the other functionality is hardly used given that it is abandoned, given that it is broken, given that it is not used by our group. Who in the WMF is the designated champion for projects like Wikibooks, Wiktionary, Commons? Seeks out what we can do and make a bigger impact? Thanks, GerardM

On Tue, 19 Apr 2022 at 22:49, Andy Mabbett andy@pigsonthewing.org.uk wrote:

On Tue, 19 Apr 2022 at 21:08, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:

...

there was mention of there being 50,000 "books" attached to English

Wikipedia. We

...

have individual images on Commons that probably have been used more

often than

...

that

Over a thousand times more than that, for several icon files:

https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:MostLinkedFiles

Even our most used photograph is used more than three times as much (Raafront.jpg Used on 185,058 pages)

-- Andy Mabbett @pigsonthewing http://pigsonthewing.org.uk _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list -- wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines and https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia-l Public archives at https://lists.wikimedia.org/hyperkitty/list/wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org/... To unsubscribe send an email to wikimedia-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org