On Fri, Aug 12, 2011 at 12:21 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Domas Mituzas wrote:
Building a service where data would be shown on every article is relatively different task from just analytical workload support. For now, building query-able service has been on my todo list, but there were too many initiatives around that suggested that someone else will do that ;-)
Yes, beyond Henrik's site, there really isn't much. It would probably help if Wikimedia stopped engaging in so much cookie-licking. That was part of the purpose of this thread: to clarify what Wikimedia is actually planning to invest in this endeavor.
If the question is "am I wasting my time if I work on this?", the answer is "almost certainly not", so please embark. It will almost certainly be valuable no matter what you do.
Now, the caveat on that is this: if you ask "will I feel like I've wasted my time?", the answer is more ambiguous, because I don't know what you expect. Even a proof of concept is valuable, but you probably don't want to write a mere proof of concept. So, if you want to increase the odds that your work will be more than a proof of concept, then there's more overhead.
Here's an extremely likely version of the future should you decide to do something here and you're successful in building something: you'll do something that gets a following. WMF hires a couple of engineers, and starts on working on the system. The two systems are complementary, and both end up having their own followings for different reasons. While it's likely that some future WMF system will eventually be capable of this, getting granular per-page statistics is something that hasn't been at the top of the priority list. In one "wasted time" scenario, we figure out that it wouldn't be *that* hard to do the same thing with the data we have, and we figure out how to provide an alternative. However, I suspect that day probably gets postponed because there would be some other system providing that function.
With any luck, if you build something, it will be in a state that we can actually work together on it at some point after we get the people we plan to hire hired. The more review you get from other people who understand the Wikimedia cluster, the more likely that case is.
Here's an extremely likely version of the future should you decide not to do something here: we won't build something like what you have in mind. So, the best way to guarantee what you want will exist is to build it.
Re: cookie licking. That's a side-effect of planning in the open. If we wait until we're sure a project is going to be successfully completed before we talk about it, we either won't be as open as we should be, or not taking the risks we should be, or both.
Rob