Thank you @zhuyifei1999 for maintaining video2commons all of these years! Could you give a bit more details on what skills a maintainer needs? What's the architecture like? What languages/technologies should you know? What are the common problems encountered / issues that the service has?

Personally, I'm interested in improving the workflow for server-side uploads, but can't commit to maintainership for the whole thing.

Thanks and sorry for the late response. My primary laptop was in repairs.

Could you give a bit more details on what skills a maintainer needs?

I can't think of anything other than knowing the languages.

What's the architecture like? What languages/technologies should you know?

So there are two main components:

• The toolforge web component ("frontend")
• The video processing machines on https://openstack-browser.toolforge.org/project/video ("backend")

These communicate to each other via a redis instance and transfer files via NFS.

I wrote some docs on how they are set up on https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Nova_Resource:Video/Help/video2commons

The web interface on the client is bootstrap + jquery, and on the server is flask. The backends are celery workers. They are written in Python and I don't think I had migrated it to Python 3. A lot of code are old and unfortunately feels ugly :(.

What are the common problems encountered / issues that the service has?

Cryptic error messages. The service expose the raw errors from the backend and people started collecting / guessing the meanings.

Large file uploads are very unreliable but I don't think it's something that can be fixed on v2c's side other than relying even more on server-side uploads.

While nowhere near the same domain knowledge as @zhuyifei1999 has I think I can take the mantle of maintaining it on life support for the time being. Medium term I think this is the kind of tool with enough complexity and popularity that it needs a team to dedicate professional resources to it. I am hoping Wiki Movimento Brasil can eventually fulfill that role, but that depends on annual plan grants.

At any rate, while I am a maintainer at https://toolsadmin.wikimedia.org/tools/id/video2commons and a couple of related tools and have access to https://github.com/toolforge/video2commons through the github toolforge organization; I'm only a member at the VPS project and cannot properly maintain without admin access. @Matanya is the only volunteer with admin access there. I ask to be added as an admin to try and keep video2commons running.