The Account Request process and the Unblock Request process on the English Wikipedia also run on Toolserver. Account requests is interesting, because the en.wikipedia community recently decided not to move this process back on-wiki: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:ACC#Account_Request_extension.2...
Not sure if it matters, but my web-based tools are located at https://github.com/Matthewrbowker/toolserver and my bots will be located at https://github.com/Matthewrbowker/toolserverBots .
Matthew Bowker
On Sep 25, 2012, at 4:45 AM, Andre Koopal andre@molens.org wrote:
On Tue, Sep 25, 2012 at 11:10:13AM +0200, Platonides wrote:
On 25/09/12 00:51, DaB. wrote:
Hello all,
in these days WMDE (the chapter that finance the toolserver) is discussing the budget for the next year (2013); you can find it at [1]. At the moment there is no money for new toolserver-hardware in this budget and the CEO Pavel Richter is unwilling to change this ([2] in german) – because he fears that there will be a Wikilabs in 2014. It is not possible for me to run the toolserver for another year with the current hardware – you all know why. For this reason I will request a change of the budget at the general meeting at November, so there will be a vote about. If this vote should fail (and we get no money for new hardware), I am going to retire from my job as root at 30. December 2012. I'm not longer able to tolerant the behavior of the german chapter and the WMF in matter of the toolserver; I do this for free and for fun, and it is not longer fun.
Sincerely, DaB.
So, out of fear that there may be a better alternative in two years time, he decides to stop supporting it now?
I know labs, and I'm not sure it will really be a better alternative. Currently, it isn't. The toolserver is much more reliable and flexible. I don't think labs will "win" in the near future, either. Although it might change in two years. Specially if no attention is payed to the toolserver for that time.
I see two big problems:
- If labs really becomes the "perfect tool hosting" in 2014, What
happens before we reach that? "Yes, your tool doesn't work, migrate to labs next year"
- We risk ending up with no good alternative at that time. labs is
still not good enough, toolserver has degraded so much it's unusable.
Not to mention the migration cost that would need to be payed by tool authors if forced to move. Although perhaps he doesn't care.
I think we should help DaB to make a case why toolserver is important. We should list the projects depending on toolserver and how, and all the other things that are important. What I can quickly think of:
- Wiki Loves Monuments: All the tooling around this really need toolserver.
- Commons: commons has a lot of toolserver tools more or less integrated
in the interface, and there are supporttools running.
- GLAM: a lot of glam-related work is done on toolservers
- small tools for wiki support: all the bots archiving talkpages, create
administrative pages automatically etc, etc ...
- steward support: There are a lot of tools (also used generally) that really
make cross-wiki abuse detection and other stewardwork much easier.
With a document like that we can make a stronger case for WMDE to reserve budget, or have them apply for a separate grant to the foundation.
Regards,
Andre
P.S: If you are in a board of a chapter that gives money to WMDE for the toolserver: Make sure that it will be spend for hardware.
[1] http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Wikimedia_Deutschland/2013_annual_plan_draft/... [2] meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:Wikimedia_Deutschland/2013_annual_plan_draft/de#Toolserver
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