Talk:Community Tech/Archive 1

Scope of this page

As we are a small team with limited resources, I would prefer that we try to keep discussions and information concerning the Community Tech team as centralized as possible and not spread over a multitude of pages on different projects, as it will be impossible for us keep them all up-to-date. I'm fine with posting some links to information about the team here, but let's keep the more detailed info on MediaWiki, which is where most (all?) WMF Engineering teams are currently documented. That should make communications a bit smoother, IMO. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 01:13, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

What would you suggest as the best way to cross-document? Soft redirect? Basic info with big push to visit MW page? There has been some discussion of how to handle this at Meta:Babel. Curious what your thoughts are as an engineering team leader. The feeling seems to be that we need to do something to document all teams on Meta as most will not think to look at three wikis for team info. However, I am personally open to a lot of ideas on how that could be done. ;) --Varnent (talk)^(COI) 16:01, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

My top preference would be a soft redirect to MW. That would minimize the chances of people starting separate discussions here. My second choice would be having just basic info about the team here with a strong push to visit the MW page. Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 21:21, 5 August 2015 (UTC)

I think that is a reasonable approach to take for now. --Varnent (talk)^(COI) 20:32, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

It does raise a question about the future of Community Tech project ideas. What or where does the team see as the future for that page? Rogol Domedonfors (talk) 20:56, 9 August 2015 (UTC)

I see that page as a forum for brainstorming and discussing ideas that can then be submitted to the cross-project technical request survey that we will be conducting (hopefully by the end of September). Ryan Kaldari (WMF) (talk) 00:33, 11 August 2015 (UTC)

Garbage data in Special:GadgetUsage?

• Wikimedia-l: Community Tech: October report 2015: "We built a new Special:GadgetUsage report that's live on all wikis; it lists gadgets used on the wiki, ordered by the number of users. Not to be clickbait or anything, but THE RESULTS WILL SHOCK YOU. Check it out at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Special:GadgetUsage or your own favorite wiki."

See discussion at de:MediaWiki_Diskussion:Gadgets-definition#Special:GadgetUsage. --Atlasowa (talk) 21:37, 11 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi, I'm not familiar with German, could you provide a gist of that discussion please? Thanks. -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 02:59, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Hi NKohli (WMF)! Let me start with confessing that i think gadget usage stats would be really useful and that I AM PUMPED TO GET THEM ;-) The problem is that the gadget/preferences data is really messy. When dewiki tried to list gadget usage in 2013 (de:MediaWiki_Diskussion:Gadgets-definition/Archiv_2013#old-diff-style.css), we found that it is pretty useless/inaccurate for several reasons:

• gadget prefs of dead/inactive users is indistinguishable from gadget prefs of active users. And there are much more old/inactive accounts. Makes the stats rather useless.
• (translated:) "In the decade that we have been collecting properties, all kinds of values have been used sometime. There is null, "", 0, NUL, true, false, y and so on."
• A gadget becomes default -> what happens to users that had opted-in before, how are they counted? For example CommonsDirekt was optional gadget, then default (with opt-out possibility), then optional gadget again (after MediaViewer activation). It doesn't appear in the usage stats at all?

This translation is difficult ;-) You can ask further questions in english at de:MediaWiki_Diskussion:Gadgets-definition#Special:GadgetUsage, and please describe how you got these gadget usage stats. Best, --Atlasowa (talk) 12:10, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

Thanks for translating! Here are my few comments:

• Default gadgets are not shown in the list at all because of all the data inconsistency issues. This was not reflected in the description on top yet, but I've pushed a patch to do that now.
• We are working on adding a column to the table showing the number of active users per gadget. Hopefully you'll be able to see it by next week.
• CommonsDirekt does not appear in the list because it is marked as default in MediaWiki:Gadgets-definition#VeraenderungOberflaeche, as per my first point above.

I'll copy over this comment to the discussion page too. Thank you! :) -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 15:25, 12 November 2015 (UTC)

@ NKohli (WMF): Any updates? [1] and [2] still show no "active" users per gadget. --Atlasowa (talk) 11:08, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Sorry about that, it's still a work under progress and might take a while. Additionally, the deployment train goes out once a week and the page is generated infrequently, it might be some time before you actually get to see it. Thanks for your patience. :) -- NKohli (WMF) (talk) 13:52, 23 November 2015 (UTC)

Cool, Special:GadgetUsage now with active users, thank you NKohli (WMF)! Brought the good news to Commons. "This list excludes gadgets enabled for everyone by default" - why not add a list of default gadgets to the special page, or a link where to find a list of the default gadgets (for the corresponding wiki)? --Atlasowa (talk) 09:31, 31 December 2015 (UTC)

That's coming soon. It's merged and will be updated after next report refresh. Cheers! NKohli (WMF) (talk) 19:08, 5 January 2016 (UTC)

citation bot

There are a bunch of solutions and possible solutions to the existing bugs in the citation bot listed on https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Citation_bot Who is in charge of implementing them in the dev bot for testing? AManWithNoPlan (talk) 22:37, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

Hi AManWithNoPlan: It looks like the maintainer isn't doing a lot of maintaining anymore. Community Tech has done some work on the Citation bot in the past, but we don't plan on doing more right now. However, seeing your detailed analysis of pretty much every problem on User talk:Citation bot, you may be qualified to become the new maintainer. :) Kaldari and Quiddity: Is there anything we can do to help AManWithNoPlan to fix these bugs? -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 22:59, 10 August 2016 (UTC)

Okay AManWithNoPlan (talk) 17:41, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

@AManWithNoPlan: I suggest sending an email to Smith609, asking him if he'd be open to adding you as a co-maintainer of the source code; linking to your extensive feedback on the bot's talkpage and any other coding credentials you can share with him; and describing what kinds of work you'd plan to do (bug-fixes, feature-additions, documentation updates, perhaps even moving the master code from googlecode into github or mw:diffusion if that would help more people to collaborate on it). (Note: I am not a dev, but those seem like potential logical next steps!) HTH. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:53, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

@AManWithNoPlan: My suggestion would be to either submit some pull requests to the github repo (https://github.com/ms609/citation-bot) or email Martin (Smith609) and see if he can add you as a maintainer to the repo (and maybe the tool labs projects as well). Martin isn't maintaining the tool any more, but he did merge my last few pull requests. If you don't have any luck with either of those approaches, let me know. Kaldari (talk) 23:47, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

I will attempt pull requests. AManWithNoPlan (talk) 23:49, 11 August 2016 (UTC)

Feedback note

Hi,

To make it clear for everyone about who is working on what, I've put a feedback note on 2016 Community Wishlist Survey and a few subpages at the bottom. This is like we do it at www.mediawiki.org with some projects. Please check whether the information provided is accurate.

If it is, please put it on other subpages which list the proposals themselves, if desired. Thank you.

--Svetlana Tkachenko / Gryllida 00:59, 2 January 2017 (UTC)

Community-Tech-fixes project

When somebody proposes some task for the team to work on in this area, I'm not sure whether the tag should be added to subscribers and whether it's ok to just add proposed tasks. From the workboard it's not clear which tasks are actually supposed to be worked on by the team. The description says "Please don't use this on its own", but does this mean that every task should also come with a component (normally #Wikimedia-General-or-Unknown) or that the tag can only be used together with #Community-Tech?

Maybe it's time to actually convert it to a subproject, or a tag, or something, and/or use an existing project used also by others, where to hold such tasks? Meanwhile, I added a mention of the project on phabricator:project/view/151/ (which hopefully doesn't give any false hope). Nemo 14:09, 3 June 2017 (UTC)

Thank you

For fixing the popular pages bot and notifying relevant Wikiprojects. Keep up the good job! --Piotrus (talk) 07:18, 7 June 2017 (UTC)

List of most edited pages last month in gl.wikipedia.org

Hi, I have seen that page, and I wanted to know if there is a page to view the most edited articles last month of gl.wikipedia.org. Bye, --Elisardojm (talk) 13:04, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

You can start with [3] IKhitron (talk) 13:23, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Thanks IKhitron, I had visited that page, but the information is about the most viewed pages, I wanted info about the most edited pages in last month... Bye, --Elisardojm (talk) 13:38, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

I see. What about the third column here: [4] IKhitron (talk) 13:41, 5 March 2018 (UTC)

Just that! Thanks!, --Elisardojm (talk) 17:21, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

No problem. IKhitron (talk) 17:34, 6 March 2018 (UTC)

Size of the community tech team

From the project page it seems like there are only a few individuals in the team, is such a team too small to resolve too big of a problem that is all the problems faced by millions of users in thousands of projects and thousands of communities? C933103 (talk) 05:45, 16 November 2018 (UTC)

Yeah, the team has been growing a bit every year, as they take on more projects. The team started three years ago with four people, and now it's got eight. We're hoping to be able to hire another engineer this year. I'm glad that you like the team's work and want it to keep growing! :) -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 19:57, 17 November 2018 (UTC)

Propose rename to Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech

Community Tech to Wikimedia Foundation Community Tech

The issue is that when anyone new sees the link to Community Tech they do not immediately understand that it is a WMF team. Anything WMF related is unusual because WMF people typically are not around in community spaces. Just as WMF staff accounts get labelled with a (WMF) tag, so should most WMF staff organizations. This one is an extra unusual case because the community tech team is for the community, not composed of the community. Blue Rasberry (talk) 00:45, 19 November 2018 (UTC)

@Bluerasberry: See Meta:Proposed_page_moves#Moving_pages_for_WMF_departments_and_teams. --Yair rand (talk) 09:48, 23 October 2019 (UTC)

Cancel 2020 Wishlist?

Seems that the approved projects of the 2019 wishlist are not fully finished yet. I fear that 2020 wishlist would distract the Tech team from the 2019 wishlist. Can the 2020 wishlist be cancelled, so the team can finish the remaining projects by autumn 2021? George Ho (talk) 02:33, 8 September 2019 (UTC)

@George Ho: Apologies for the late response! You may be relieved to know that we had some of the same concerns. For this reason, we announced a new format for the 2020 wishlist. This year, we're just going to focus on the non-Wikipedia content projects, and we're only going to address the top five wishes from this survey. Check out the Community Wishlist Survey 2020 page for more info. Thanks! --IFried (WMF) (talk) 19:41, 9 October 2019 (UTC)

New Page Review

HI Ilana.

Good practice on Wikipedia requires that you comment at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:New_pages_patrol/Reviewers on the posts that are marked for your attention.

Best wishes for the holidays and 2020.

Kudpung

Wikipedia:Database reports/Forgotten articles was forgotten

As requested on the talk page, and then on en:Wikipedia talk:Database reports#Wikipedia:Database reports/Forgotten articles was forgotten I am reporting this here. en:Wikipedia:Database reports/Forgotten articles hasn't been updated all decade, and it used to be updated roughly biweekly. Community Tech bot hasn't touched it since December, and there has been no response on their talk page. --Awkwafaba (talk) 19:00, 15 March 2020 (UTC)

What to do with 2021 Wishlist?

If the 2021 Wishlist can't be cancelled, then what else to do with the top 2019 and 2020 wishlists? I've not yet seen separate project pages of 2020 Wishlist created yet, and I see remaining 2019 Wishlist yet to be completed and fulfilled. George Ho (talk) 21:38, 3 April 2020 (UTC)

@George Ho: Thanks for the message. We currently have no plans to cancel the 2021 wishlist. We are also still working on the wishes from the 2019 wishlist, and we'll be launching our first project from the 2020 wishlist soon. We have needed to slow down a bit due to the current crisis, but we're still getting a lot of work done. Thanks! --IFried (WMF) (talk) 19:06, 8 May 2020 (UTC)

How soon? It's been nearly five months since your reply. I've yet to see the first project of the 2020 wishlist launched. George Ho (talk) 09:49, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

@George Ho: The first project from the 2020 wishlist has indeed been launched. Please refer to the Ebook Export Improvement Project page. As for the 2021 wishlist, we're currently in the process of sharing information with everyone for 2021. Information will be posted in the next few weeks. As you can imagine, the impact of the pandemic has slowed down some of our work, and we've needed some time to plan for 2021 in a way that was sustainable and appropriate for the times. Thanks for your patience and stay tuned for an update in the next few weeks. --IFried (WMF) (talk) 13:26, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Meanwhile, I was planning to update the "Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Results" by adding the project page, similar to "Community Wishlist Survey 2019/Results", but I was afraid of breaking the translation coding. George Ho (talk) 18:08, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

@George Ho: I just added a link to the project page on Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Results. Thanks! --IFried (WMF) (talk) 19:06, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

Any latest progress for the projects of the 2019 wishlist, by any chance, besides the watchlist expiration project? George Ho (talk) 21:31, 30 September 2020 (UTC)

@George Ho: We have published a status report on the 2019 wishlist. Additionally, you can find updated summaries on the statuses of recent wishlists on the 2019 and 2020 results pages. We'll be launching a new 2021 wishlist survey page very soon, and we will begin accepting wishes on November 16th. Thanks! --IFried (WMF) (talk) 18:45, 28 October 2020 (UTC)

Wishlist

I cannot make it out - is it now possible to propose a wish, or not ? In special, my wish depends possibly more the Lua domain; is there another page better suited to propose it? -- sarang♥사랑 12:00, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

You can always file a feature request in Phabricator. The usual advice applies. Nemo 16:39, 20 July 2020 (UTC)

Thank you, but there I have a problem: I need to register to Phabricator because I had not yet. My email address was taken from my preferences, but somehow it had been mutilated - instead of @gmail.com it was @gmal.com. Now I shall check my emails but of course I do not receive any. And it is impossible to me to correct it, I cannot go back to retype it. I need help! -- sarang♥사랑 16:55, 21 July 2020 (UTC)

@Sarang: Hello! We will have a new 2021 wishlist survey starting soon, and we will begin accepting proposals on November 16, 2020. The survey page will be officially launched in the next few days (it is in draft mode; we're just cleaning up & finalizing a few things). In that case, we are happy to share you have another opportunity to participate in the survey, and we look forward to reading your proposals! Thanks! --IFried (WMF) (talk) 18:40, 28 October 2020 (UTC)

2021 wishlist survey?

The 2020 survey was already running on October 22, this year there isn’t even a schedule yet. Will there be a survey, or it’s gone with COVID? —Tacsipacsi (talk) 00:05, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

@Tacsipacsi: Hello! Yes, there will be a survey this year, but we'll be starting it a few weeks later (November 16). We're planning for the official survey page, with guidelines and calendar dates, to be posted next week. We're running a bit behind schedule, due to COVID-related slowness, but we found it important to have the survey this year. Once the 2021 survey page is published, we'll reach out to folks via various channels to publicize the survey. Thanks for checking in and reaching out. --IFried (WMF) (talk) 14:03, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

@IFried (WMF): Thanks for the reply, I totally understand that things just happen slower this year. However, I think a note about the delay on Community Wishlist Survey right now would be useful so that other people interested in the survey know that it’s not forgotten. —Tacsipacsi (talk) 19:37, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

@Tacsipacsi: That's a great suggestion; thanks for bringing it up! I'll post an update to the page today. --IFried (WMF) (talk) 19:54, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

Section Name in Diff

Hi. What do you mean in re-prioritized? IKhitron (talk) 14:19, 22 October 2020 (UTC)

@IKhitron: We have shared a brief explanation in the 2019 wishlist status report, but we'll be providing more details when the 2021 community wishlist survey page is launched (it's in draft mode, and it should be officially up soon). In the meantime, here's a bit of explanation: From now on, the team will now have one backlog per year. This means that, each year, volunteers will vote on our new backlog. They can propose new wishes or re-propose old ones. Once the voting is complete, we'll have one new backlog. This is a change from our old format, which allowed us to work on multiple backlogs per year. With this change, we can simplify our work, ensure the most important wishes get addressed, and reassess old wishes each year. Since we didn't have time to work on "section name in diff," we are saying that it is eligible for revote in the 2021 community wishlist survey. This way, we can know its priority in our new backlog. So, if you think it's still high-priority, you can re-propose it in the 2021 survey, vote on it, and canvas others to vote on it. That way, we can an updated sense of its priority (rather than depending on old data). Thanks so much! --IFried (WMF) (talk) 18:38, 28 October 2020 (UTC)

From my side, this wish already won by old terms, so it can't be re-voted, but only implemented, you can't "broke the contract" postfactum. IKhitron (talk) 14:51, 29 October 2020 (UTC)

@IKhitron: We understand where you're coming from, and there's a chance that we can still work on the wish. We just want to get an updated sense of its priority in the 2021 wishlist survey. For this reason, we strongly encourage you to re-propose it and canvas for it, if you feel that it should be worked on. We have also now launched the 2021 Community Wishlist Survey page, so you can learn more about the format of the survey, and why we have made some recent changes. It is our hope that these changes will help prevent issues like this occurring in the future, and that we can give folks a better sense of what's actually possible for us to accomplish in a year. Thanks! --IFried (WMF) (talk) 17:08, 30 October 2020 (UTC)

Well, you are very wrong, but I can't change this, it's just an issue of your conscience. Thank you for your time. IKhitron (talk) 18:01, 2 November 2020 (UTC)

Music Theory popular pages

Hi, I suspect that Music theory articles on WP don't fluctuate very rapidly in page views so I was wondering if it would be possible to run the popular pages function once for pages marked as part of Wikiproject Music Theory. This is because I plan to work on some music theory related topics but would rather focus on those that are being visited a lot since I recently realized that the Time Signture page gets ~800,000 views a year! Best, Aza24 (talk) 00:18, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

@Aza24: Hello! You can get real-time pageviews for a WikiProject by plugging the category into the Massviews Analysis tool. Make sure to check the "Use subject page instead of talk page" option. For instance, here's all pages in WikiProject Music Theory sorted by pageviews for the past 20 days: [5]. Kind regards, MusikAnimal (WMF) (talk) 19:02, 6 November 2020 (UTC)

AWB Hidden Category

Hi guys. Is there any way to view hidden category in the AWB? CyberTroopers (talk) 05:28, 27 November 2020 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey 2020/Results New OCR tool

Hello! Quote: Research has begun. A project page will be launched soon (November or December). There is no year specified. Which one is meant? 2019 or 2020? Does this project page already exist? Thanks for an answer. -- Tirkon (talk) 00:40, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

@Tirkon: Hello! You can find the project page, which provides details on the project, here. Thanks! --IFried (WMF) (talk) 16:24, 14 April 2021 (UTC)

Community Wishlist Survey in general

In general, it is a good idea to conduct surveys. But so far, almost only developers can participate. This is because Phabricator tickets often play a big role in defining the project proposals. Their technical jargon, however, is not understandable for example normal Wikipedia authors. There may be no other option. Nevertheless, it is a fact that one could think about. Possibly there is a way to defuse the problem a little. -- Tirkon (talk) 01:17, 31 December 2020 (UTC)

How can community volunteers advocate for Tech Team expansion?

Is the Annual Planning process amenable to community members standing up for growing the Tech Team? It really hasn't been keeping up with donations growth, and it should. I'd like to see more features, more bug fixes (although bugs have been pretty rare lately, other than in the mobile apps, of which I'm not really a fan), retiring technical debt, and taking over tools maintenance, and not just for abandoned tools -- let's get vital tools supported before the volunteers disappear, not months to years after.

Who do we ask to get the largest probability that expansion will happen? 2601:647:4D00:2C40:28A8:62C5:5E60:79D0 23:00, 29 April 2021 (UTC)

Upcoming or ongoing?

@NRodriguez (WMF): You added Copy and paste from diffs and Warn when linking to disambiguation pages to the Ongoing section, but didn’t remove them from Upcoming. The translation system doesn’t allow that (we need to change the ID of either occurrence and thus make it not translated into any language), but it doesn’t make sense either: either you plan to work on something, or you’re already working on it, not both at the same time. So are these upcoming or ongoing? —Tacsipacsi (talk) 17:28, 28 August 2021 (UTC)

Sorry about the confusion! I have cleaned it up and it should reflect the correct order now. NRodriguez (WMF) (talk) 15:09, 30 August 2021 (UTC)

Talk to Us: The future of the Community Wishlist Survey

We would like to invite you to an online meeting with us. We will ask you for advice about the future of the Community Wishlist Survey. The meeting will take place on 30 November (Tuesday), 17:00 UTC on Zoom, and will last an hour. See how to join. SGrabarczuk (WMF) (talk) 00:04, 26 November 2021 (UTC)

A way to ping all of CommTech

@TheresNoTime-WMF and KSiebert (WMF): The group-mentioning template I mentioned the other day is {{ping group}} and {{participants}}. It seems that it's not fully functioning on Meta (it seems to depend on a WikiProject structure that's not really used here and wouldn't work for our team). Those templates have been tagged for deletion. But the general idea is sound, I think: that it should be reasonably easy to ping the team, either on this talk page or elsewhere on Meta. What do you think? It'd be invoked with something like {{ping group|CommTech}}. — SWilson (WMF) (talk) 02:53, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Sounds like a good idea.. do you think you can get the templates working? ~TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • she/her) 10:40, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Yes, I would really like that and would honestly need it right now! KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 10:43, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

@CommtechUser:NRodriguez (WMF)User:KSiebert (WMF)User:DMaza (WMF)User:MusikAnimal (WMF)User:SWilson (WMF)User:HMonroy (WMF)User:DWalden (WMF)User:STei (WMF)User:JFernandez-WMFUser:JMcLeod (WMF)User:TheresNoTime-WMFUser:GMikesell-WMF: ahah! ~TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • she/her) 12:29, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

@CommTech Your are ge-ni-us! KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 12:40, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

And I've just created {{@commtech}} to make it a bit easier ^^ ~TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • she/her) 12:51, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

Thanks, that's helpful, as I already used it wrong. :-) KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 14:08, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

@TheresNoTime-WMF: This is great, thanks for sorting it out. :) SWilson (WMF) (talk) 01:44, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

vi:Wikipedia:Báo cáo cơ sở dữ liệu/Thành viên tích cực có lịch sử đóng góp lâu đời nhất

Hi. May I ask what the purpose of this page is? All edits made after June 25 2019 contain nothing useful. NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 14:48, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh: I'm taking a little look now and will get back to you.. ~TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • she/her) 16:06, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

@NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh: Just to keep you updated, I ran the SQL query that the bot does manually at Quarry query 65200 — it took around 25 minutes to run, and the output seems to be similar to that at the viwiki page.. perhaps it would be more useful to only return users with edits? I'm running a test of that at Quarry query 65208, so we'll see how it looks when it finishes! ~TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • she/her) 17:14, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Yep. That sounds a lot better. Thanks! NguoiDungKhongDinhDanh 17:28, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Great, and the results at https://quarry.wmcloud.org/query/65208 look a bit more sensible at least 😊 I've logged this issue on your behalf, and have submitted a pull request which will hopefully resolve it — thank you for the report! ~TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • she/her) 18:57, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Some changes were made by MusikAnimal (WMF) which will hopefully improve the quality of the data reported there ~TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • she/her) 21:55, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

Talk page navigation

I added a link to IPA audio renderer to our talk page nav template. Is it worth adding wishlist items prior to 2021 as well? SWilson (WMF) (talk) 08:17, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

That sounds like a good idea :) ~TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • she/her) 10:59, 13 June 2022 (UTC)

Okay, done. I think I've done them all. Not sure what should be added to the RC list, because it's probably not worth adding the old ones. Although, no harm in doing so either, I guess. SWilson (WMF) (talk) 04:04, 15 June 2022 (UTC)

Funding and support for Wish #4 2022

@CommTechUser:NRodriguez (WMF)User:KSiebert (WMF)User:DMaza (WMF)User:MusikAnimal (WMF)User:SWilson (WMF)User:HMonroy (WMF)User:DWalden (WMF)User:STei (WMF)User:JFernandez-WMFUser:JMcLeod (WMF)User:TheresNoTime-WMFUser:GMikesell-WMF:

Hello!

I'd like to request funding and support in order to fulfill Wish #4 of the 2022 Community Wishlist Survey. This wish requests a tool to deal with potential image copyright violations. Suggested methods for detection include EXIF metadata, size, account edits, web matches, author, percentage of user uploads, and quality. Most of these factors are not difficult to detect with open-source libraries, but web matches generally require usage of paid APIs.

I opened a grant request (https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Grants:Project/MSIG/EpicPupper/Fortuna) that was declined due to reasons not relating to the topic of the project, but rather due to the scope of that particular funding program. I believe that support from Community Tech is a better solution overall, as it provides long-term stability and simplifies finances. A Wikimedia Foundation team can likely benefit from the nonprofit discounts Google, Bing, TinEye and Pixsy offers as well.

I am planning to create a MediaWiki extension to present copyright patrollers with a stream of potentially copyright-violating files. This extension tentatively will utilize the Google Cloud Vision, Bing Visual, Pixsy and TinEye APIs. I would appreciate support from Community Tech in administering accounts for these APIs once the project is complete and deployed. An initial pricing estimate before taxes, fees and nonprofit discounts totals roughly 5,000 USD to sustain the project for 6 months. Before starting on this project, I would appreciate a commitment to administer such accounts, to ensure the continued operation of the software.

For more information, please see the grant request, which includes architecture details, budgeting notes, and plans for implementation. If you have any questions, please do not hesitate to contact me on any Wikimedia wiki.

Thank you for your consideration,

EpicPupper (talk) 05:48, 18 July 2022 (UTC)

Hey there, nice to e-meet you, thanks for writing. I am Natalia, the product manager for Community Tech. We met as a team this morning to discuss this.

We unfortunately don't approve or grant any budget requests, so we can't provide any support in a financial sense. It's not in the purview of our team to approve such financials.

We recently had a change in resources too (the team is smaller, we had our designer moved to a different team) and we are managing expectations given this shift in staffing. We will not be working on this wish this year.

As for the nonprofit discounts, we are not immediately aware of any discounts associated with the Copyright services either. There are some internal conversations happening about the copyright laws and changes at large, but the details are still being shaken out and will take years to come to fruition given that they depend on policy changes at the national level.

We can offer our support to review any patches if the work does come to fruition. We investigated this and discussed that building this functionality into a pre-existing tool CopyPatrol could be a potential avenue for building a wish like this.

Wish I had better news for you! Thanks for all your volunteering work and for carrying on the momentum of trying to fulfill the fourth most popular wish this year. Let me know if you have any more questions and happy to get them answered. NRodriguez (WMF) (talk) 19:24, 21 July 2022 (UTC)

Maintenance Changes

Dear all,

In order to get better at making our internal processes more transparent, we wanted to let you know that over the last couple of months we have been discussing how we can improve the way we maintain our work. We would like to continue discussing this here, to include you all and make upcoming changes to our processes more visible, as it’s your wishes that we are working on implementing.

We have noticed that with the growing number of projects that we maintain, and from all teams at the Foundation we do maintain the most projects whilst keeping our head count the same, we don’t spend as much time as we would like on actually making wishes come true.

So, after discussing with other teams and internally we are thinking about introducing the following changes:

1. During the prioritization stage we will start considering maintenance.

   If we estimate that a feature will require an immense amount of maintenance, we may have to reduce the prioritization score, as we might not be capable of keeping all functionalities intact in :the future

2. We will consult more with other teams about implementation details.

   Our hope is that this will make it more likely that other teams would continue maintaining our work, if we implemented it in a way that matches their expectations.

3. We will agree about how long we will maintain wishes as a team.

   We will work hard on finding maintainers of our work and make it clear who, be it another internal team or interested members of the community, continues maintaining our work.

   In any case, we want to discontinue assuming that we can maintain all tools forever while not being able to handle the load of bug requests and additions and be more honest with ourselves about what we can achieve.

   A default maintenance time will be between 6-12 months.

   We will encourage the community to resubmit wishes or propose maintenance requests for tools.

4. We will make transparent what the maintenance status is.

   Besides the “active” and “passive” development statuses, we will also introduce “Unsupported by CommTech”

@CommTechUser:NRodriguez (WMF)User:KSiebert (WMF)User:DMaza (WMF)User:MusikAnimal (WMF)User:SWilson (WMF)User:HMonroy (WMF)User:DWalden (WMF)User:STei (WMF)User:JFernandez-WMFUser:JMcLeod (WMF)User:TheresNoTime-WMFUser:GMikesell-WMF: Feel free to comment and discuss more below everyone! KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 17:45, 8 June 2022 (UTC)

I think this is a good idea. It'll be nice to have some more clarity around when we should stop working on a project. At the moment, we have the ever-growing list at Community Tech/Maintenance, and any time a bug comes in on any of them we sort of triage and try to figure out if we should do anything (I say "sort of" because the reality is that there are too many incoming bugs for them all to get looked at, and especially for projects that we haven't touched in a while the tendency is for it to feel like too much of a context switch to figure out enough to even triage a bug). I'm not really sure what the overall answer is though, because of course all existing projects should be maintained! SWilson (WMF) (talk) 01:53, 9 June 2022 (UTC)

Regarding our existing projects: I do believe we can find a way to see which projects are still being used so much that it's clearly necessary to continue maintaining them. I also wonder if there's a way we could let the community vote which ones in our Community Tech/Maintenance list are most of interest from them, as we are implementing them for and with technical contributors in the community. Maybe someone from the community wants to chime in? On the other hand we were thinking of ways to track usage of our tools to maybe take a data driven decision, but the way we track this data seems like it's not standardised so it's hard to compare. KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 17:27, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

@KSiebert (WMF): I was going to suggest getting some input from the community 🙂 I've just asked the Tech News writers if it would be worth mentioning these changes/this thread in the next issue to try to drive a bit of community feedback ~TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • she/her) 17:52, 10 June 2022 (UTC)

So #1 feels great. #2 is also great. So is #4. But for #3 essentially it's being said that assuming #2 doesn't pan out that the only method the community has towards having what it wants done is to add to tech debt? Like I guess that's implicitly what's been happening - as I know well from the wishlist wish I was most involved in - and yet there's something about having that made explicit that just feels not great. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 17:20, 1 July 2022 (UTC)

This seems like a resources problem. Maintaining existing tools is as, or more, important as developing new tools, but I can understand why developing new tools has historically been implicitly prioritized given the limited resources Community Tech has access to. Frankly, the current situation makes us look pretty unprofessional – Google and Facebook don't allow products that are actively deployed on a production site to go without any team having maintenance responsibility over them. The most ideal situation would be expanding Community Tech and giving it enough resources to develop important Community priorities and maintain the things it has developed that are still actively deployed on a production WMF site.

TLDR: From a funding perspective, units that maintain tools should receive just as much attention as units that create new tools. KevinL (aka L235 · t) 01:07, 3 July 2022 (UTC)

I totally agree. We shouldn't have actively-used projects not getting required maintenance! One good thing that has happened at times in the past is that people have proposed maintenance tasks in the Wishlist; that seems like a good idea, although generally only applicable for larger things (e.g. making sure a tool is migrated away from an unsupported stack) and doesn't catch the smaller day-to-day stuff. I don't think we as a team are going to figure out an actual way to support everything we've ever worked on (sorting that out is a broader conversation and is on-going elsewhere, from what I understand) — but what we can do as a team is make sure that the time we do spend on older projects is well-spent. That's what this discussion is about, I think.

Letting go of maintenance of a project after a year or so feels like the least bad way of doing it. That would mean that there's the possibility for a "keep working on this project" wish to be voted on, and it also hopefully catches all the bugs that come up in the time after active development has slowed.

Oh, and also: I feel like quite a few of out projects are not actually "new" but are generally re-engineering older ideas. Lots of ideas come from gadgets, or tools that other people have built but no longer maintain, etc. So we might refer to "new features" that we work on, but they often have their roots in stuff that's been thought about for years. — SWilson (WMF) (talk) 08:04, 4 July 2022 (UTC)

Hey all, glad to see that this conversation got moving, that was exactly my hope.@Barkeep49 I understand that the sound of #3 makes you feel a bit uneasy, I want to emphasize that this is the approach we have thought of for future wishes, and the idea is to make the maintenance status & the reason for our decision transparent at all times. We feel like at the moment we often disappoint technical contributors when they submit work and we can't attend to them. Therefore our idea is to be more transparent about when we are actively developing something, when we just do passive maintenance and for how much longer and when ever decide to discontinue supporting something. If we do something like discontinuing some tool there would be a valid reason like lack of usage or no need for further support as it's stable enough, that we would have to and want to prove to you, the contributors, and we would do that in the maintenance table while linking to some data-driven decision we took.

@L235 I really like that funding perspective, what a great dream to be able to accommodate as much maintenance as feature requests, which really makes me wonder why one doesn't often see Engineering teams where this was possible. Personally, I have always ever seen a lower percentage reserved for maintenance work sadly.

Also, you were spot on that this is a matter of resources and and as a consequence we were trying to look at our team they way it currently works and thought about how can we be reliable and still build new features.

Generally we just want to get more systematic about what we maintain and also introduce priorities for maintenance, instead of wildly trying to maintain everything. KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 17:48, 5 July 2022 (UTC)

At a fundamental level I agree with L235 that "Google and Facebook don't allow products that are actively deployed on a production site to go without any team having maintenance responsibility over them." But I will also note that such a mentality can mean beloved products get closed. Taking features out of mediawiki presents some challenges, especially when it would be done for the first time or the first time it gets widely noticed, that it might not for a major tech company. But despite that it might still be better than the alternative we have now. Best, Barkeep49 (talk) 21:56, 6 July 2022 (UTC)

I think these are all fairly reasonable. If I have a comment, it's somewhat offtopic to the above but I think makes L235's more explicit: mediawikiwiki:Developers/Maintainers needs a lot fewer Unassigned in the Stewards column and (probably) a lot fewer blanks in the Maintainers column. I realize the point of CommTech's enumerated items above is that you shouldn't be responsible for filling in those blanks, but it's pretty clear to me that WMF should have resourcing to at least steward if not fully maintain each of the systems in that list. Izno (talk) 02:05, 8 July 2022 (UTC)

Hey all,

@Izno I wanted to reply to your comment, a lot of us definitely think that the Maintainers table needs some updating, there's a lot of discussion going on at the moment about how we can be more accountable for the work we build and that's also one important priority being discussed with the new CPTO starting. As we as a team wanted to address this critical subject maintenance already, we started a discussion within our reach, the context of our team, already.

I finally wanted to come back to this conversation and update you all about what happened in the meantime. As we discussed previously we wanted to get a bit more strategic and united as a team about how we address maintenance, especially when we are triaging tickets. We were deciding on a case-by-case basis what to do with a ticket and if to prioritize, or work on it, which potentially made us take inconsistent decisions.

We then discussed within the team which metrics could be essential for us to measure which tools are important to the communities we serve. The two metrics that we chose to have a better look at are the usage and number of incoming tickets in the last year.

Unfortunately, these metrics are admittedly imperfect, because not all projects have one metric in common so they are not truly comparable, for example, while we look at page views for some tools, we measure uploads for another one, and for some of the tools we have a dedicated way to track usage implemented. One additional thing we learned from this is that we’ll be more persistent in implementing some way to track these metrics in the future when working on new wishes.

So, from now on we can look at our renewed maintenance list, which has a maintenance status assigned to each project. We are hoping for this to be more consistent as we review comprehensively review if to maintain work or not. For the three projects that we currently tagged as “Unmaintained by CommTech”, which are:

• IA Upload
• Numerical sorting
• EventMetrics

the agreement was that they are essentially completed quite some time ago, are stable, don’t have an outstandingly high usage at the moment, and if attention gets redrawn to them if we will re-review.

The other maintenance statuses are as important as they can guide us when prioritising maintenance work, depending on if a project is still highly used and small improvements are being made. We would be really curious to see what you all think about this refined approach and also are planning to have talk-to-us hours to discuss the maintenance strategy if people are interested. Please comment here to show interest or discuss more as you please! KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 12:31, 4 August 2022 (UTC)

@KSiebert (WMF), I don’t understand what “Per statement” means, in Code review column of maintenance status overview table. Can you explain me, please? -- Pols12 (talk) 13:55, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

@Pols12 yes sure, "Per statement" means we'll decide looking at each individual patch as we would of course like to encourage volunteer contributions and want support contributors in getting their work merged. KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 14:04, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

OK, thanks! 🙂 -- Pols12 (talk) 14:10, 8 August 2022 (UTC)

Switching to the "code of conduct for Wikimedia technical spaces"

@CommTechUser:NRodriguez (WMF)User:KSiebert (WMF)User:DMaza (WMF)User:MusikAnimal (WMF)User:SWilson (WMF)User:HMonroy (WMF)User:DWalden (WMF)User:STei (WMF)User:JFernandez-WMFUser:JMcLeod (WMF)User:TheresNoTime-WMFUser:GMikesell-WMF: We currently list the grant friendly space expectations as our guiding code of conduct — I'd like to propose that we instead adopt the code of conduct for Wikimedia technical spaces, as it more accurately addresses some more technical areas of interaction (code reviews etc.). There is no real difference in the substance of the expectations ~TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • she/her) 12:29, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Absolutely happy with that change. KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 12:44, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

I've gone ahead and Done that in Special:Diff/23760686 ~TheresNoTime-WMF (talk • she/her) 16:18, 6 September 2022 (UTC)

Reminder: CommTech Talk to us hours tomorrow at 1pm UTC

Dear all, as we want to have regular talk to us hours we would like to remind you that we are having one tomorrow where we collect feedback about our maintenance approach and also collect other topics for future sessions that you can come with. More about tomorrow here: Community Wishlist Survey/Updates/Talk to Us 2022-09-14 KSiebert (WMF) (talk) 20:10, 13 September 2022 (UTC)

What does “organizes proposals” mean in the context of CWS?

I came here from the CWS main page to try to get more information about how the word “organizes” should be translated, but I’m not finding anything that’s not already mentioned there. Can someone clarify what “organizes” means in the context? Does it simply mean “categorize”, or does it mean more, and if more, what exactly? Thanks! Al12si (talk) 04:53, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Al12si, I speak native English, French, and German, and many of the other European Germanic and Romance languages with varying degrees of fluency, and some Slavic languages. In nearly all of them organise is almost the same word and with the same meaning. If you can provide a context (diff, thread, paragraph, sentence, etc), and the target language you want, I'd be more than happy to help. Kudpung (talk) 05:32, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Kudpung, the page I was looking at is the table on Community_Wishlist_Survey_2023 and my target language is Cantonese. Sorry for asking too early and thanks for mentioning other languages, which I forgot to check. I’ve found my answer on the Japanese page.

(The string was already translated in Cantonese, but it was translated as “組織”, as in organizing an event or entity, which was clearly not quite right but it threw me off and I couldn’t figure out what the correct sense should be. The Japanese page has it translated as “整理”, as in organizing chaos and bringing about structure and order, which makes perfect sense in the context.) Al12si (talk) 06:02, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Al12si. Yes, I'm sorry, logographic systems are outside my sphere but did you try 组织, 组,or 编 ? Kudpung (talk) 06:24, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

组织（組織） is incorrect, or at least misleading to some readers. 组 and 编 would be ambiguous. I think the Japanese translator did a great job using 整理. Thanks :-) Al12si (talk) 06:32, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

I believe the best translation of the two examples is "organizing chaos and bringing about structure and order" — when we say "Community Tech reviews and organizes proposals" we mean that Community Tech will look at the proposals and sort/categorise/gather/structure them. I hope that helps, and thank you for the help with translations! ~TheresNoTime-WMF (talk) 06:26, 24 January 2023 (UTC)

Autosuggest linking Wikidata item after creating an article

Hi! Where I can see something about it? :) Iniquity (talk) 12:09, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

Hello @Iniquity, your question is not clear, but in case you are looking for similar Wikidata proposals, please look at the Wikidata category. The first proposal currently may be related. Let me know if I understood you. –– STei (WMF) (talk) 12:47, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

I am about your progress report from this page. You said its done. :) Iniquity (talk) 14:05, 2 February 2023 (UTC)

@Iniquity in that case we have updates here about the wish's fulfilment. Please let me know if the link is helpful. –– STei (WMF) (talk) 13:10, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

So, it is not done? :) Iniquity (talk) 14:02, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

@Iniquity as you may have noticed there's a discussion on what is considered "done" and "in progress". The fact of the matter is the feature is available. It can only be used via user script only but not as a gadget until there's feedback from you all. I can still mark it as "in progress" if that helps. –– STei (WMF) (talk) 15:33, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

I did not know about the discussion, you can not change it, I just wanted to understand for myself what to focus on, thanks! Iniquity (talk) 20:44, 3 February 2023 (UTC)