[Wikitech-l] Re: Kartographer: New feature for showing nearby articles

I just want to thank the WMDE team, as well as the WMF service ops team for putting so much work into Kartographer and Kartotherian over the last two years. A great deal of effort was put into solving many, many small problems and several major ones and building a whole new feature. The code is now better understood, more readable and easier to maintain, the service more predictable and reliable. At the same time, this is a great example of how much mess builds up when we halt product development and don't maintain it for a couple of years and how long it takes to clean that up, without even getting around to most of the feature requests that editors have asked for. Heck, in the process, about as many if not more new tickets were added as there have been solved and removed from the backlog. There is still years worth of potential development here. While Maps in particular is vulnerable to this, as it deals with so much data, features and also technologies which we don't use a lot within the MediaWiki/Wikimedia eco sphere, this is only a magnifying glass for much of the multimedia content within the projects. I hope the foundation has been paying a lot of attention to this project, as there are lots of lessons all around. From how we got there, to how difficult a seemingly 'small' problem can be (data sync issues with OSM), to what the community is asking for (attention to bugs that get in the way of usage of functionality), to cleanup efforts required before feature development can even start in cases like this, as well as how to research and listen to communities. Big hug for all those who worked on it and obviously cared about making it work. Y'all get a barnstar ! DJ On Wed, Apr 19, 2023 at 1:22 PM Johanna Strodt <johanna.strodt(a)wikimedia.de> wrote: