Proposed in Community-Wishlist-Survey-2016. Received 43 support votes, and ranked #29 out of 265 proposals. View full proposal with discussion and votes here.
Problem
Many gadgets start small, often as a proof of concept, but when they reach some level of popularity and high use than they need to be revisited and possibly rewritten with long-term maintenance and stability in mind. Some popular gadgets are written by people who are no longer active, or more focused on other things than maintenance of old gadgets, and if no one steps up to maintain them problems and incompatibilities accumulate. Some gadgets are copied to other projects and multiple versions diverge. Many users rely heavily on tools and gadgets to do more efficiently their tasks on Wikimedia projects and keeping the tools running is important to keep them happy and busy.
Who would benefit
Users of gadgets
Proposed solution
Identify high-use gadgets on different projects and ensure that there is a long-term plan to maintain them. That might require code rewrite to more maintainable version or conversion to extension format. Would require a link to phabricator pages where one can report errors and issues. Current approach on Commons of protected edit requests on gadget's Javascript talk pages seems quite dangerous. For example on Commons, I suspect we should look more closely at HotCat, Cat-a-lot, VisualFileChange and ImageAnnotator. I am sure Wikipedia might have other popular gadgets.
Proposed implementation: I envision a site on Tool Labs that hosts a mostly-JS AWB that does editing. The backend would only authenticate users (OAuth), store settings and editing lists, and collect statistics. Most of JS code can be made reusable in Node.js for use by fully-automated bot developers.
Technical details
Time, expertise and skills required
- e.g. 2-3 weeks, advanced contributor, javascript, css, etc
Suitable for
- e.g. Hackathon, GSOC, Outreachy, etc.
Proposer
Related links
- T159334: Discussion: Create a Central Gadget Taskforce
- T108630: [AOI] Investigation: How can we improve HotCat?
- T121470: Central Global Repository for Templates, Lua modules, and Gadgets
- T87730: Set up process / criteria for taking over abandoned tools
- T151056: HotCat gadget does not handle multipage files well