Grants talk:IEG/MediaWiki data browser

Congratulations! Your proposal has been selected for an Individual Engagement Grant.

WMF has approved partial funding for this project, in accordance with the committee's recommendation. This project is funded with $15,000.

Comments regarding this decision:
This 6-month investment will support development to prove the concept and demonstrate this framework's usefulness as outlined in your measures of success. Respecting your choice, as discussed, to keep the plan and measures scoped as-is even with reduced funding, we look forward to supporting you and seeing the end product!

Next steps:

1. You will be contacted to sign a grant agreement and setup a monthly check-in schedule.
2. Review the information for grantees.
3. Make any necessary scope adjustments to your proposal page, as discussed with grantmaking staff.
4. Use the new buttons on your original proposal to create your project pages.
5. Start work on your project!

Questions? Contact us.

Aggregated feedback from the committee for MediaWiki data browser

Scoring criteria (see the rubric for background)	Score 1=weakest 5=strongest
Potential for impact
(A) The project fits with the Wikimedia movement's strategic priorities	3
(B) The project has the potential to lead to significant online impact.	4
(C) The impact of the project can be sustained after the grant ends.	3
(D) The project has potential to be scaled or adapted for other languages or projects.	4
Ability to execute
(E) The project has demonstrated interest from a community it aims to serve.	4
(F) The project can be completed as scoped within 6 months with the requested funds.	3
(G) The budget is reasonable and an efficient use of funds.	3
(H) The individual(s) proposing the project have the required skills and experience needed to complete it.	4
Fostering innovation and learning
(I) The project has innovative potential to add new strategies and knowledge for solving important issues in the movement.	3
(J) The risk involved in the project's size and approach is appropriately balanced with its potential gain in terms of impact.	3
(K) The proposed measures of success are useful for evaluating whether or not the project was successful.	3
(L) The project supports or grows the diversity of the Wikimedia movement.	3
Comments from the committee: Interesting way to improve data visualization on Wikipedia and other MediaWiki wikis. Would nicely fit with Wikidata's progress if successful. Appears to be a high-risk, high-reward proposal from a trusted source with good endorsements. May be better integrated into Wikidata as opposed to being something completely external. Somewhat unclear benefits beyond what categories, scripts and bots organizing information from the API already provide. Not well aligned with strategic priorities. Requested compensation seems high. Because the proposal is focused on the software framework, without end use, the prospected impact on the Wikimedia projects would be indirect. Presumes the wiki in concern has rich base of primary content on which you want to discover interesting views. This is a bit different from our central focus, primary content creation and supporting people doing that. The project plan lacks detail where necessary for a large request: budget and measures of success.

Eligibility criteria related to engineering

Hi Yaron, thanks for submitting this proposal. My guess from what you've said in your plan is that because you are planning to build a Javascript framework rather than an extension needing code review or another feature that requires integration with MediaWiki's core, this proposal would not conflict with the engineering-related eligibility criteria we added to IEGrants this week. But, I would like to make sure that you've seen that criteria, and it would be good to have confirmation from you on how we're interpreting your approach, any hosting requirements you may have, etc. Thanks! Siko (WMF) (talk) 21:18, 15 February 2013 (UTC)

Hi, yes - this functionality does not directly interface with MediaWiki code (except through the MediaWiki API), and will not require any coordination with the Wikimedia Foundation, for either development or hosting. As I write in the application, it would be nice to have one or more "apps" developed with this framework be available on the wikipedia.org or wikidata.org domains, but it's not necessary. Yaron K. (talk) 14:53, 17 February 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for confirming. Siko (WMF) (talk) 01:35, 18 February 2013 (UTC)

On increasing participation and some more use cases

I am glad to see this project going well as planned, and I like how it enables easier navigation through the list of Wikimania 2013 presentations. I think t would be awesome to see some more use cases, especially on-wiki with a living editing community, and see how the users have to say. Ideally, I would want to see how it will help improving experience of editors and readers of the Wikimedia wikis (i.e., Increasing Participation in the words of the project proposal). In that light, here are some suggestions I was thinking about.

1. Creating an Miga demo for MediaWiki extension manuals to enable easier navigation of those hundreds of manual pages about MediaWiki exstensions, currently available at mediawiki.org. The "Extension:" pages have many attributes (found in the infobox and as categories) that seem to fit to Miga, and I personally sometimes find them difficult to navigate through.
2. I wonder if mediawiki.org can be one the first "deployment" targets with the application above. A live demo usable "on wiki" would showcase its ability to improve editor/reader experience. I think the community of mediawiki.org is relatively liberal about hosting experimental things that might not really be finished. Before proposing a gadget (or perhaps an extension?), if possible, it could start as a user script that is connected to Miga-for-MediaWiki-extension-manuals.

How do these ideas sound? --whym (talk) 11:58, 17 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks; I agree that putting such demos on WMF wikis, or at least linking to them from there, would be a great step. And the extensions info on mediawiki.org would be a good candidate for it, because it's highly structured and a manageable size. (That's the same reason we've been trying to get Semantic MediaWiki onto mediawiki.org for years now.) I may create another Miga demo using the mediawiki.org extension data; it makes a lot of sense. It wouldn't require a gadget or extension, though; Miga itself is displayed entirely outside of MediaWiki. And then I suppose anyone could just add links to it on mediawiki.org themselves... Yaron K. (talk) 17:35, 27 September 2013 (UTC)

Thanks for your reply. To clarify on the second point ("deployment"), I was thinking something like an overlay display of a Miga application onto MediaWiki. Could it be overlayed on MediaWiki like HackPad is (which is live here on Meta)? Or could it be integrated like mw:Extension:CategoryTree does? From a user-experience point of view for editors, I don't think it is ideal to force editors of a wiki visit the wiki site and its corresponding Miga site back and forth. --whym (talk) 14:59, 28 September 2013 (UTC)

Ah, I see. It's true that navigating away from the wiki is not ideal, but on the other hand there are benefits to doing it that way: because Miga can work offline, if people go to a separate URL to view it, they can keep visiting that URL even if they lose connection, and can even create a URL shortcut icon for it on their mobile devices. Maybe the best option is to allow both: have an embedded application, but include a direct link to that outside URL as well. Miga can already (I'm pretty sure) be embedded via an iframe, by using the Widgets extension. I don't know if that's a good-enough solution; in any case it would probably be good to add documentation for it. Yaron K. (talk) 14:29, 29 September 2013 (UTC)

Integration

Hi, thanks for the awesome work. Would you consider integrating the tool into wiki software (as a gadget, extension, or built-in)? Would doing so be technically feasible? Gryllida 09:40, 7 November 2013 (UTC)

As I wrote above, it might make the most sense as a widget, using the Widgets extension. A gadget or extension could work too. The key, though, is that this wouldn't really be integration - the code base would stay separate, but there could be ways of simply displaying the Miga output within wiki pages. Yaron K. (talk) 19:59, 18 November 2013 (UTC)

Yaron K., I wanted to thank you for the wonderful work as I read the final report. How would you like to make it more available to an average Wikipedia, Commons etc users? I think 99% simply don't know about its existence. I thought of perhaps simply linking to it at Special:Search, but I wanted to know your opinion on the opportunities to build it into the interface for an interactive experience. Gryllida (talk) 06:53, 25 December 2013 (UTC)

Sorry for the long delay! I didn't see this until now, two months later. (I need to monitor these pages better, obviously.) Yes, obviously this needs more publicity, and I'm working on that, though slowly. Including it directly in Wikipedia, Commons etc. though is not necessarily a good idea - the "apps" enabled by Miga are meant to be a supplement, an alternative way to browse Wikipedia, etc. data; as opposed to a navigation tool for Wikipedia itself. Though on the other hand, any kind of link would be great... Yaron K. (talk) 04:25, 25 February 2014 (UTC)