n 29 May 2014 15:43, Lila Tretikov lila@wikimedia.org wrote:
We have deeper graphs. I want to be sensitive to our product team's time, but I am sure they will share when they can.
Hi Lila,
As well as WMF teams, there are quite a few volunteers about who pull reports from the database or through the API and generate interesting reports, tables and charts to support projects they are interested in. For a bit of fun I manually generate this report of active Commons contributors with more than 10,000 edits https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User:F%C3%A6/Userlist.
It might be an idea to think of how you can encourage unpaid volunteers to try playing around with generating reports and creating bots to maintain them so that, as a community, more volunteers can do it themselves and produce test examples in an agile fashion, and reduce the burden on WMF teams to respond to requests.
I find the labs, API and database user guides okay, but not easy, for a non-technical person to work out what they need to do to get started. Noting that the the API sandbox was a *great* well designed feature to add to the wikis. In practice, as an older guy with a technical but non-internet background, it took me nearly a year to become not-too-terrible at doing bot-stuff (and I still have not got around to working out how to run SQL queries via Python to the Wikimedia database), for the very few contributors that are interested in what happens behind the scenes, this is a tough barrier to overcome. I have been asked to help with a workshop on GLAM related automated uploading at Wikimania. I'm dreading it, as having tried several times, I find it really hard to explain to another Wikimedia how to go about this stuff in an understandable step by step fashion, without listening to myself and realising how it awkwardly sounds like explaining how to do a DNA analysis using kitchen tools from someone who watches CSI but cannot remember the periodic table.
Fae