We could definitely file a task. However, it does seem like highlighting the features that will no longer be available is an appropriate topic for a discussion about migration in a technical mailing list.
A specific question related to a functionality is the topic for a task, I don't think that we should discuss every detail that differs from the ORES API (Wikitech-l doesn't seem a good medium for it). We are already following up on Phabricator, let's use tasks if possible to keep the conversation as light and targeted as possible.
Is there a good reference for which features have been excluded from ores-legacy? It looks like
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/ORES covers some of the excluded features/models, but not all of them.
We spent the last months helping the community to migrate away from the ORES API (to use Lift Wing instead), the remaining traffic is only related to few low traffic IPs that we are not able to contact. We didn't add feature injection or threshold optimization to ores-legacy, for example, since there was no indication on our logs that users were relying on it. We have always stated everywhere (including all emails sent in this mailing list) that we are 100% open to add a functionality if it is backed up by a valid use case.
I see now that it looks like the RevertRisk model will be replacing the damaging and goodfaith models that differentiate intentional damage from unintentional damage. There's a large body of research on why this is valuable and important to the social functioning of the wikis. This literature also discusses why being reverted is not a very good signal for damage/vandalism and can lead to problems when used as a signal for patrolling. Was there a community discussion about this deprecation that I missed? I have some preliminary results (in press) that demonstrate that the RevertRisk model performs significantly worse than the damaging and goodfaith models in English Wikipedia for patrolling work. Do you have documentation for how you evaluated this model and compared it to damaging/goodfaith?
We have model cards related to both Revert Risk models, all of them linked in the API portal docs (more info:
https://api.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lift_Wing_API). All the community folks that migrated their bots/tools/etc.. to Revert Risk were very happy about the change, and we haven't had any request to switch back since then.
The ML team provides all the models deployed on ORES on Lift Wing, so any damaging and goodfaith variant is available in the new API. We chose to not pursue the development of those models for several reasons:
- We haven't had any indication/request from the community about those models in almost two years, except few Phabricator updates that we followed up on.
- Managing several hundreds models for goodfaith and damaging is not very scalable in a modern micro-service architecture like Lift Wing (since we have a model for each supported wiki). We (both Research and ML) are oriented on having fewer models that manage more languages at the same time, and this is the direction that we are following at the moment. It may not be the perfect one but so far it seems a good choice. If you want to chime in and provide your inputs we are 100% available in hearing suggestions/concerns/doubts/recommendations/etc.., please follow up in any of our channels (IRC, mailing lists, Phabricator for example).
- Last but not the least, most of the damaging/goodfaith models have been trained with data coming from years ago, and never re-trained. The efforts to keep several hundreds models up-to-date with recent data versus doing the same of few models (like revert risk) weights in favor of the latter for a relatively small team of engineers like us.
FWIW, from my reading of these announcement threads, I believed that generally functionality and models would be preserved in ores-legacy/LiftWing. This is the first time I've realized the scale of what will become unavailable.
This is the part that I don't get, since as mentioned before all the models that currently run on ORES are available in both ores-legacy and Lift Wing. What changes is that we don't expose anymore functionality that logs clearly show are not used, and that would need to be maintained and improved over time. We are open to improve and add any requirement that the community needs, the only thing that we ask is to provide a valid use case to support it.
I do think that Lift Wing is a great improvement for the community, we have been working with all the folks that reached out to us, without hiding anything (including deprecation plans and path forwards).
Thanks for following up!
Luca