Just as a quick update from WMCH - we are currently discussing our strategy/priorities for the 2015-20 cycle and yes, we plan to decide over the Summer whether we want to ramp up our development activities or not.

We will, of course, keep you guys posted.

2014-06-26 10:29 GMT+02:00 Jon Davies jon.davies@wikimedia.org.uk:

Thanks Erik, This is certainly something we are keen to work on. I was talking to Magnus just last night and of course our experience with Europeana has taught us a lot )I hope we have fully learnt the messages!). We are undertaking a scoping review of our Development plans at the moment and this will be part of the consideration.

Jon

On 26 June 2014 04:54, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Hi folks,

At the Zurich Hackathon, I met with a couple of folks from WM-CH who were interested in talking about ways that chapters can get involved in engineering/product development, similar to WM-DE's work on Wikidata.

My recommendation to them was to consider working on GLAM-related tooling. This includes helping improve some of the reporting tools currently running in Labs (primarily developed by the illustrious and wonderful Magnus Manske in his spare time), but also meeting other requirements identified by the GLAM community [1] and potentially helping with the development of more complex MediaWiki-integrated tools like the GLAMWiki-Toolset.

There's work that only WMF is well positioned to do (like feeding all media view data into Hadoop and providing generalized reports and APIs), but a lot of work in the aforementioned categories could be done by any chapter and could easily be scaled up from 1 to 2 to 3 FTEs and beyond as warranted. That's because a lot of the tools are separate from MediaWiki, so code review and integration requirements are lower, and it's easier for technically proficient folks to help.

In short, I think this could provide a nice on-ramp for a chapter or chapters to support the work of volunteers in the cultural sector with appropriate technology. This availability of appropriate technology is clearly increasingly a distinguishing factor for Wikimedia relative to more commercial offerings in its appeal to the cultural sector.

At the same time, WMF itself doesn't currently prioritize work with the cultural sector very highly, which I think is appropriate given all the other problems we have to solve. So if this kind of work has to compete for attention with much more basic improvements to say the uploading pipeline or the editing tools, it's going to lose. Therefore I think having a "cultural tooling" team or teams in the larger movement would be appropriate.

I've not heard back from WM-CH yet on this, but I also don't think it's an exclusive suggestion, so wanted to put the idea in people's heads in case other organizations in the movement want to help with it. I do want WMF to solve the larger infrastructure problems, but the more specialized tooling is likely _not_ going to be high on our agenda anytime soon.

Thanks, Erik

[1]

https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/a/a2/Report_on_requirements_f...

...

-- Erik Möller VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation

---

Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

-- *Jon Davies - Chief Executive Wikimedia UK*. Mobile (0044) 7803 505 169 tweet @jonatreesdavies

Wikimedia UK is a Company Limited by Guarantee registered in England and Wales, Registered No. 6741827. Registered Charity No.1144513. Registered Office 4th Floor, Development House, 56-64 Leonard Street, London EC2A 4LT. United Kingdom. Wikimedia UK is the UK chapter of a global Wikimedia movement. The Wikimedia projects are run by the Wikimedia Foundation (who operate Wikipedia, amongst other projects). Telephone (0044) 207 065 0990.

Visit http://www.wikimedia.org.uk/ and @wikimediauk _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/GuidelinesWikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

Hoi, There are several issues and imho the one Erik mentions is crucial. When no money is intended for GLAM tool related work, nothing will happen. The situation will remain one where everybody is eying each other... are you going to make a move ... are you?

If you are all for a comprehensive technical infra structure blabla, all well and good. Nothing is going to happen without an initiative and, any initiative that does not have funding support will end up on Labs. Fiddling with small scale improvements are nice, it will provide some solace but what we need is a next generation of tools and of particular importance is reporting. An environment is being developed for statistics and reporting but as far as I can see it is either really hard or developments are not being communicated or there is not much to report anyway.

Erik challenges the chapters. I hope the chapters rise to the occasion and define a plan. From what I observed the most important part of the products that are of use to GLAMS, stability is the main thing. We need continuous reporting. We need the continuous availability of tools. That is very much more than only a question of Labs or not Labs.

If anything it is a challenge to Erik how he envisions to provide a platform for statistics that will be continuously available and how he will ensure that tools are stable and are available. Thanks, GerardM

PS The statistics for Wikidata are still broken and who is going to tackle that and the break in reporting ???

On 25 October 2014 16:16, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:

Erik Moeller wrote:

...

I'm not seeing any developer contract time allocated to GLAM tooling work yet. At the same time I'm seeing reports of breakage and missing functionality in important tools running in Labs. To the extent that this breakage is due to Labs infrastructure or access to data, it's our job (WMF) to fix it and you should (continue to) poke us to do so -- but to the extent that it can be addressed in the tools themselves, I'd love to see chapters take this on directly.

Maybe, but we need to clearly define what a smart investment of resources looks like. In my opinion, it's much closer to the development of an extension such as GWToolset than it is to trying to have someone hack at a few PHP scripts on Wikimedia Labs.

Labs is a playground and Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums are serious enough to warrant a proper investment of resources, in my view. Magnus and many others develop magnificent tools, but my sense is that they're largely proofs of concept, not final implementations.

We need to build infrastructure, and while Labs is itself infrastructure, it's really a sandbox for neat ideas, not a proper resolution to technical problems facing the wikis.

If people want to substantively contribute to the technical ecosystem, that requires fully integrating into it. This typically means developing and supporting a deployed MediaWiki extension or, more rarely, integrating directly into MediaWiki core. This type of development requires an intelligent and focused set of requirements for new extensions or development projects that gets a thorough review (and sign-off) by the people who will ultimately be deploying and indefinitely hosting this code.

GLAMs and Chapters could make all kinds of investments into new functionality for the projects. Improved Wikidata modeling and data entry into Wikidata, an in-browser SVG (or rasterized image) editor, better media search, enhancements to Wikisource/OCR, etc. There's no shortage of work to be done, but it's moderately challenging currently to develop scalable solutions to the larger problems. If GLAMs and Chapters aren't willing to try to tackle a harder problem, there are also plenty of smaller improvements needed to both MediaWiki and its hundreds of extensions that could also benefit everyone. But again, the focus would be integrating into the Wikimedia technical platform and fixing issues in production, rather than trying to make Labs scripts and tools better.

MZMcBride

---

Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe

Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:

MZMcBride, 25/10/2014 16:16:

...

But again, the focus would be integrating into the Wikimedia technical platform and fixing issues in production, rather than trying to make Labs scripts and tools better.

False dichotomy IMHO. Usual example:* https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/42259 Quite clearly WMF's responsibility to make it possible, but all the interfaces and value are in consumers/tools.

Nemo

(*) Yes, I know https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Page_view is being worked on.

I think it's a limited view to suggest that the Wikimedia Foundation should only provide raw dumps and/or queryable data and have volunteers try to cobble together scripts and tools to interact with the data. That certainly can and should be a piece of this, but there's no good reason not to, for example, integrate page view graphs into MediaWiki's info action, allowing regular users to see quickly and easily see an article's page views over time.

We already have queryable revision information, but we rely on external tools and services to try to graph edits over time, rather than having visual functionality integrated into MediaWiki. The same is true of visualizing a particular user's edits or other logged actions. We're relying on external tools when we should be trying to create tools that live within the technical platform that we've created. A generalized, scaleable graphing/visualization tool would be an excellent use of resources. Making such a tool could easily have a definable goal with clear requirements, and implementing and deploying such a tool would have a very clear benefit to all of our projects.

We have a real problem turning proofs of concept into stable infrastructure. GLAMs and Chapters can invest in creating stable infrastructure, but that probably doesn't mean investing in Labs, exactly. Not if you want to have a long-term, substantive impact, in my opinion.

Regarding page views data specifically, the Wikimedia Foundation has done a good deal of cookie-licking in this area and that really should be addressed. The linked bug report demonstrates what I'm talking about. It's been _years_ of waiting as various analytics team have come and gone (does anyone remember when Open Web Analytics was going to save the day?). And yet it's 2014 and we still can't answer the most basic analytics questions such as "how many views did X article get this month?" There has been some deep dysfunction in this area of the Wikimedia Foundation, but I don't know what any GLAM institution or Wikimedia Chapter can do about the analytics situation, so it may be best to focus on other areas in which making an impact is feasible.

MZMcBride

On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 7:16 AM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:

Labs is a playground and Galleries, Libraries, Archives, and Museums are serious enough to warrant a proper investment of resources, in my view. Magnus and many others develop magnificent tools, but my sense is that they're largely proofs of concept, not final implementations.

Far from being treated as mere proofs of concept, Magnus' GLAM tools [1] have been used to measure and report success in the context of project grant and annual plan proposals and reports, ongoing project performance measurements, blog posts and press releases, etc. Daniel Mietchen has, to my knowledge, been the main person doing any systematic auditing or verification of the reports generated by these tools, and results can be found in his tool testing reports, the last one of which is unfortunately more than a year old. [2]

Integration with MediaWiki should IMO not be viewed as a runway that all useful developments must be pushed towards. Rather, we should seek to establish clearer criteria by which to decide that functionality benefits from this level of integration, to such an extent that it justifies the cost. Functionality that is not integrated in this manner should, then, not be dismissed as "proofs of concept" but rather judged on its own merits.

GWToolset [3] is a good example. It was built as a MediaWiki extension to manage GLAM batch uploads, but we should not regard this decision as sacrosanct, or the only correct way to develop this kind of functionality. The functionality it provides is of highly specialized interest, and indeed, the number of potential users to-date is 47 according to [4], most of whom have not performed significant uploads yet. Its user interface is highly specialized and special permissions + detailed instructions are required to use it. At the same time, it has been used to upload 322,911 files overall, an amazing number even without going into the quality and value of the individual collections.

So, why does it need to be a MediaWiki extension at all? When development began in 2012, OAuth support in MediaWiki did not exist, so it was impossible for an external tool (then running on toolserver) to manage an upload on the user's behalf without asking for the user's password, which would have been in violation of policy. But today, we have other options. It's possible that storage requirements or other specific desired integration points would make it impossible to create this as a Tool Labs tool -- but if we created the same tool today, we should carefully consider that.

Indeed, highly specialized tools for the cultural and education sector _are_ being developed and hosted inside Tool Labs or externally. Looking at the current OAuth consumer requests [5], there are submissions for a metadata editor developed by librarians at the University of Miami Libraries in Coral Gables, Florida, and an assignment creation wizard developed by the Wiki Education Foundation. There's nothing "improper" about that, as Marc-André pointed out.

As noted before, for tools like the ones used for GLAM reporting to get better, WMF has its role to play in providing more datasets and improved infrastructure. But there's nothing inherent in the development of those tools that forces them to live in production land, or that requires large development teams to move them forward. Auditing of numbers, improved scheduling/queuing of database requests, optimization of API calls and DB queries; all of this can be done by individual contributors, making this suitable work for even chapters with limited experience managing technical projects to take on.

On the analytics side, we're well aware that many users have asked for better access to the pageview data, either through MariaDB, or through a dedicated API. We have now said for some time that our focus is on modernizing the infrastructure for log analysis and collection, because the numbers collected by the old webstatscollector code were incomplete, and the infrastructure subject to frequent packet loss issues. In addition, our ability to meet additional requirements on the basis of simple pageview aggregation code was inherently constrained.

To this end, we have put into production use infrastructure to collect and analyze site traffic using Kafka/Hadoop/Hive. At our scale, this has been a tremendously complex infrastructure project which has included custom development such as varnishkafka [6]. While it's taken longer than we've wanted, this new infrastructure is being used to generate a public page count dataset as of this month, including article-level mobile traffic for the first time [7]. Using Hadoop/Hive, we'll be able to compile many more specialized reports, and this is only just beginning.

Giving community developers better access to this data needs to be prioritized relative to other ongoing analytics work, including but not limited to:

- Continued development and maintenance of the above infrastructure foundations;

- Development of "Vital Signs": public reports on editor activity, content contribution, sign-ups and other metrics. This tool gives us more timely access to key measures than WikiStats [9] (or the reportcard [10], which to-date still consumes Wikistats data). Rather than having to wait 4-6 weeks to know what's happening with regard to editor numbers, we can see continuous updates on a day-to-day basis.

- Development of Wikimetrics, which analyzes the editing activity of a group of editors, and which is essential for measuring all movement work that targets increased activity by a targeted group (e.g. editathon), and is a key tool used for grants evaluation (was a funded program worth the $$?). A lot of thought has gone into the development of standardized global metrics [12] for program work, much of it using this technology and dependent on its continued development.

- Measurement (instrumentation) of site actions and development/maintenance of associated infrastructure. As an example, in-depth data collection for features like Media Viewer (see dashboards at [13] ) is only possible because of the EventLogging extension developed by Ori Livneh, and the increasing use of this technology by WMF developers. EventLogging requires significant management, maintenance and teaching effort from the analytics team.

Lila is requesting visibility into all primary funnels on Wikimedia sites (e.g. sign-ups, edits/saves through wikitext, edits/saves through VisualEditor, etc.), and this will require lots of sustained effort from lots of people to get done. What it will give us is a better sense of where people succeed and fail to complete an action -- by way of example, see the initial UploadWizard funnel analysis here: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/UploadWizard/Funnel_analysis

- Improved software and infrastructure support for A/B testing, possibly including adoption of existing open source tooling such as Facebook's PlanOut library/interpreter [14].

- Improved readership metrics, possibly including a privacy-sensitive approach to estimating Unique Visitors, and better geographic breakdowns for readers/editors.

These are all complex problems, most of which are dependent on the small analytics team, and feedback on projects and priorities is very much welcome on the analytics mailing list: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/analytics

With regard to better embedding of graphs in wikis specifically, Yuri Astrakhan has led the development of a new extension, inspired by work by Dan Andreescu, to visualize data directly in wikis. This extension has been deployed already to Meta and MediaWiki.org and can be used for dynamic graphs where it's appropriate to not have a fallback to a static image, for example in grant reports. See: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Graph/Demo https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Graph:User:Yurik_(WMF)/Obama

I agree this is the kind of functionality that should make its way into Wikipedia. Again, we need to judge throwing a full team behind that against the relative priority of other work. In the meantime, Yuri and others will continue to push it along and may even be able to get it all the way there in due time. The main blockers, from what I can tell, are generation of static fallback images for users without JavaScript, and a better way to manage the data sources.

In general, the point of my original message was this: All organizations that seek to improve Wikipedia and the other Wikimedia projects ultimately depend on technology to do so; to view WMF as the sole "tech provider" does not scale. Larger, well-funded chapters can take on big, hairy challenges like Wikidata; smaller, less-funded orgs are better positioned to work on specialized technical support for programmatic work.

I would caution against requesting WMF to work on highly specialized solutions for highly specialized problems. If such solutions are needed, I would caution against building them into MediaWiki unless they can be generalized to benefit a larger number of users, at which point it's appropriate to seek partnership with WMF, or to ask WMF for the relative priority of such work. But often, it's perfectly fine (and much faster) to build such tools and reports independently, and to ask WMF for help in providing APIs/services/data/infrastructure to get it done.

Cheers, Erik

[1] http://tools.wmflabs.org/glamtools/ [2] https://outreach.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:This_Month_in_GLAM_Tool_testing... [3] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:GWToolset [4] https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3AListUsers&user... [5] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:OAuthListConsumers?name=&publishe... [6] https://github.com/wikimedia/varnishkafka [7] https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Analytics/Pagecounts-all-sites [8] https://metrics.wmflabs.org/static/public/dash/ [9] http://stats.wikimedia.org/ [10] http://reportcard.wmflabs.org/ [11] https://metrics.wmflabs.org/ [12] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Learning_%26_Evaluation/Global_metric... [13] http://multimedia-metrics.wmflabs.org/dashboards/mmv [14] https://github.com/facebook/planout

On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 5:58 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

Indeed, highly specialized tools for the cultural and education sector _are_ being developed and hosted inside Tool Labs or externally. Looking at the current OAuth consumer requests [5], there are submissions for a metadata editor developed by librarians at the University of Miami Libraries in Coral Gables, Florida, and an assignment creation wizard developed by the Wiki Education Foundation.

The Wiki Education Foundation just introduced its Assignment Wizard, which is being developed with the help of an outside agency. As this tool develops, there may be opportunities for sharing experiences with other Wikimedia organizations:

http://wikiedu.org/blog/2014/11/07/user-testing-assignment-design-wizard/

Erik

When I start from this page: http://wikiedu.org/blog/2014/11/07/user-testing-assignment-design-wizard/

and I click the wizard.wikiedu.org http://wikiedu.org/blog/2014/11/07/user-testing-assignment-design-wizard/wizard.wikiedu.org link I arrive in a page which says: This is somewhat embarrassing, isn’t it?Is this the aim?

Regards

http://wikiedu.org/blog/2014/11/07/user-testing-assignment-design-wizard/wizard.wikiedu.org

On Tue, Nov 11, 2014 at 6:35 AM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

On Sat, Oct 25, 2014 at 5:58 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:

...

Indeed, highly specialized tools for the cultural and education sector _are_ being developed and hosted inside Tool Labs or externally. Looking at the current OAuth consumer requests [5], there are submissions for a metadata editor developed by librarians at the University of Miami Libraries in Coral Gables, Florida, and an assignment creation wizard developed by the Wiki Education Foundation.

The Wiki Education Foundation just introduced its Assignment Wizard, which is being developed with the help of an outside agency. As this tool develops, there may be opportunities for sharing experiences with other Wikimedia organizations:

http://wikiedu.org/blog/2014/11/07/user-testing-assignment-design-wizard/

Erik

-- Erik Möller VP of Product & Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation

---

Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe