On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 12:21 PM, MZMcBride <z(a)mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Domas Mituzas wrote:
Building a service where data would be shown on
every article is relatively
different task from just analytical workload support.
For now, building query-able service has been on my todo list, but there were
too many initiatives around that suggested that someone else will do that ;-)
Yes, beyond Henrik's site, there really isn't much. It would probably help
if Wikimedia stopped engaging in so much cookie-licking. That was part of
the purpose of this thread: to clarify what Wikimedia is actually planning
to invest in this endeavor.
If the question is "am I wasting my time if I work on this?", the
answer is "almost certainly not", so please embark. It will almost
certainly be valuable no matter what you do.
Now, the caveat on that is this: if you ask "will I feel like I've
wasted my time?", the answer is more ambiguous, because I don't know
what you expect. Even a proof of concept is valuable, but you
probably don't want to write a mere proof of concept. So, if you want
to increase the odds that your work will be more than a proof of
concept, then there's more overhead.
Here's an extremely likely version of the future should you decide to
do something here and you're successful in building something: you'll
do something that gets a following. WMF hires a couple of engineers,
and starts on working on the system. The two systems are
complementary, and both end up having their own followings for
different reasons. While it's likely that some future WMF system will
eventually be capable of this, getting granular per-page statistics is
something that hasn't been at the top of the priority list. In one
"wasted time" scenario, we figure out that it wouldn't be *that* hard
to do the same thing with the data we have, and we figure out how to
provide an alternative. However, I suspect that day probably gets
postponed because there would be some other system providing that
function.
With any luck, if you build something, it will be in a state that we
can actually work together on it at some point after we get the people
we plan to hire hired. The more review you get from other people who
understand the Wikimedia cluster, the more likely that case is.
Here's an extremely likely version of the future should you decide not
to do something here: we won't build something like what you have in
mind. So, the best way to guarantee what you want will exist is to
build it.
Re: cookie licking. That's a side-effect of planning in the open. If
we wait until we're sure a project is going to be successfully
completed before we talk about it, we either won't be as open as we
should be, or not taking the risks we should be, or both.
Rob