S Page wrote:
http://devhub.wmflabs.org is a prototype of the
"Data and developer hub",
a portal and set of articles and links whose goal is to encourage
third-party developers to use Wikimedia data and APIs. Check it out, your
feedback is welcome! You can comment on the talk page of the project page
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/dev.wikimedia.org , or file Phabricator
tickets in the project
dev.wikimedia.org [1].
Since December 2013 Moiz Syed and others discussed creating "a thing" to
expose our APIs and data to developers. When S Page moved to WMF tech
writer, he wrote some articles for this on
mediawiki.org and with Quim Gil
developed a landing page from the wireframe designs [2].
The prototype is using the Blueprint skin and running on a labs instance,
but the articles are all regular wiki pages on
mediawiki.org that we
regularly import to
http://devhub.wmflabs.org
I'm glad that we're using
mediawiki.org as the data source.
Q: Yet another site? Arghh!
A: Agreed, T101441 "Integrate new Developer hub with mediawiki.org" [5].
It's a separate site for now in order to present a different appearance.
Q: But why a different appearance? Why a separate skin?
Our competition for developer mindshare is sites like
https://developers.google.com/ . We believe looking like a 2000s wiki page
is a *deterrent* to using Wikimedia APIs and data. We hope that many
third-party developers join our communities and eventually contribute to
MediaWiki, but "How to contribute to MediaWiki" [6] is not the focus,
providing free open knowledge is.
I don't think a cutesy FAQ section absolves you of your sins. You've
created yet another wiki and increased our collective technical debt. I
also find the argument that anyone cares about the appearance of
documentation over its content a bit insulting.
That said, I appreciate the informative e-mail and the collection of tasks
filed for future improvement.
The content of this "data and developer hub" is currently pretty...
anemic. Where's the information about database dumps (XML and SQL)?
Where's the information about the replicated databases available on Tool
Labs? Where's information about how I can take my pre-existing skills in
Python, Perl, PHP, Ruby, etc. and use a library or framework to easily
retrieve content from Wikimedia in my application or script or bot?
Where's information about creating a bot? I clicked over to
<https://rest.wikimedia.org/> and now I get the strong impression that I
need an api_key? Yet I can't find any place where I might generate such a
key and I can't find any information about why a key would be necessary.
More to the point: why not just make
dev.wikimedia.org a round robin that
points to either <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Data> or
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_contribute>? I think it would be a
lot more valuable like that. I don't see how pointing people to the
Wikidata home page or Commons home page or a list of Wikimedia projects is
helpful at all and these are the three most prominent links on the page.
MZMcBride
P.S. If it sounds as though I'm frustrated, it's probably due to the
limited design resources we have being allocated pretty much exclusively
to dubious microsites like the Transparency Report and this Data and
Developer Hub, instead of having design resources devoted to, y'know,
improving the real sites that receive billions of views per month.