Toolhub/Progress reports/2021-12-17
Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the week ending 2021-12-17.
Message help from community
[edit]Amire80 sent us a patch to remove "successfully" from two messages. This fix is inline with the advice at mw:Help:System message#Avoid_jargon_and_slang about avoiding the binary success/fail thinking that is common for developers and less common for users.
Improvements to locale switching
[edit]Slavina has continued to document and work towards fixing bugs in our Vue user interface related to locale changes. The general class of problems being discovered and worked on is strings in the user interface which are not fully connected to Vue's reactivity system. When everything works as planned Vue updates the rendered versions of these message strings with data from the newly selected locale's translation files without a full reload of the application. One of the common issues we have discovered in our code is setting translated messages in data properties rather than in computed properties. This fix of using computed properties was discovered by the upstream vue-i18n community.
Planning for January-March 2021
[edit]The team has been spending more time in the past week talking about general direction and feature sets that we will build in the coming Foundation fiscal quarter. Our high level plan for the second half of the Foundation's fiscal year that was set nearly a year ago now is to work to make it easier for users to evaluate the "quality" of a tool.
We did some work earlier in the year on talking to different types of users about what they look for to decide if a tool is reliable, useful, and safe. That research did not make our path clear, but it has helped us understand that even folks we recognize as highly productive editors do not necessarily understand how to evaluate tools themselves. One finding was that many rely on word of mouth for recommendations of good tools from others more than self evaluation of the tool's source code or bug tracker history.
Recent discussions have focused on ideas related to the annotations features that Harej outlined in the past to add more data for comparisons. Broadly the idea of annotations is to have data associated with a toolinfo record that is edited by the Wikimedia community. This could be new types of information that the toolinfo.json does not cover such as adding tools to categories based on intended audience or use case. We are also stating to consider some annotations which would be overlapping with toolinfo data and only presented if the associated toolinfo record is missing the same data. This would allow collaboration on completing the collected data for a tool while also avoiding issues of automatically reconciling changes made through the UI/API and changes discovered by the toolinfo.json crawler process.
Wrap up
[edit]The Foundation's fiscal year 2021-2022 Q2 (October-December 2021) is nearly over. Back in October we reached the milestone of our 1.0 release. In November, Raymond and Slavina both joined the team to help expand our capacity for bug fixes and feature additions. Seve has been learning more about the tools ecosystem in general as he works to help us plan for new features and prioritize other changes. Bryan has been splitting time between Toolhub and other projects with the Technical Engagement team, but is planned to return to Toolhub as a primary focus in January.
The Foundation will be taking an end of year holiday break from December 24th through January 3rd. This weekly summary will return in January 2022. We wish everyone a happy end of year!