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(a)gmail.com> wrote:

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(a)pigsonthewing.org.uk> wrote: