Right now we have multiple Phabricator tags tracking the work that is happening for or in Wikimedia Labs. However, due to legacy reasons (e.g. Bugzilla) and organic growth, the tags have grown into being quite confusing. Both their scope (Labs team? Labs projects? Tools) and their naming is wildly inconsistent and team planning within WMF is hard.
To sum up, we currently have:
* #Labs the "team" tag that contains WMF Labs staffers + volunteer admins. Many infrastructure-related tasks are tagged with this tag.
* #Tool-Labs for the Tool Labs project. Unfortunately, most tasks tagged with that are not tagged with #Labs as well; both projects have their own workboards but are worked on by mostly the same people, which makes team planning difficult.
* #Wikimedia-Labs-Infrastructure which has Labs infrastructure-related tasks. Most tasks there are not tagged with #Labs either :(
* #Wikimedia-Labs-General & #Wikimedia-Labs-Other, with a distinction that very confusing even to old-timers (also see T87372).
* #Wikimedia-Labs-wikitech-Interface for wikitech.wikimedia.org-related requests (wikitech isn't just Labs though and may not have OpenStackManager at all soon, so it's really confusing)
* #Wikimedia-Labs-wikistats & #Wikimedia-Labs-extdist (& possibly others); this is for specific Labs projects that have nothing to do with the Labs team, despite the similarity in namespace. Other projects have completely differently-named tags, such as Beta-cluster.
* #tool-labs-tools-* (e.g. #tool-labs-tools-article-request ), similar to the above but for Tools.
* #Labs-Vagrant which has nothing to do with neither the Labs team nor a specific Labs project but is something more generic.
* Others?
I propose:
- Everything that the Labs **team** is/should be working on should be tagged with #Labs. This is actually a hard requirement for team-planning/prioritization purposes within the WMF structure.
- #Tool-Labs should probably remain a project-tag.
- #Wikimedia-Labs-Infrastructure should be renamed to Labs-Infrastructure and converted into a yellow tag. All tasks tagged with it should also be tagged with #Labs and it should be also applied consistently for past tickets as well with a triaging session.
- #Wikimedia-Labs-General should be dropped entirely. Every task there should be tagged with just #Labs instead.
- #Wikimedia-Labs-wikitech-Interface should probably be converted into a yellow tag and be renamed to 'Wikitech'. Its description should mention #MediaWiki-extensions-OpenStackManager for software-related bugs / features, rather than operationsl issues.
Things I'm not yet sure about:
- #Labs-Vagrant … maybe rename to "Vagrant-Labs"? It sounds silly but it's really more of a Vagrant project than a Labs project.
- #Wikimedia-Labs-Other … I'm not sure about this at all. What is it being used for now? We could name it something like #Labs-project (suggestion for a better name is welcome) and make it a yellow tag. One thing I know for sure is that tasks there should **not** be tagged with #Labs (unless there's some dependency on the Labs infrastructure).
- #Wikimedia-Labs-wikistats & #Wikimedia-Labs-extdist should probably be named just "wikistats" and "extdist". Or something like that. Those projects are hardly about Labs at all. Not sure, though.
- #tool-labs-tools-*. Maybe rename to just #tool-*? In any case, like above, no Herald rules to tag with #Labs — this is about individual teams working on Tools, not the main Labs team.
I'd like to solicit feedback for this and form a plan forward, especially from the Labs team, Labs volunteers & the ECT team (@Qgil, @Aklapper in particular). This is not yet actionable.