Gadgets

7 statements.

Author	Tags	Primary Session	Secondary Sessions	Position Statement
Jan Dittrich	Documentation, Gadgets, Infrastructure, JavaScript, Open Source, Research	Evolving the MediaWiki Architecture	Research, Analytics, and Machine Learning	I believe that we need to achieve a better separation of concerns - in code as well as in work on product and our communication with the communities to reduce the dept we build up in these areas. Therefore, I want to suggest three interrelated topics: Use of modern MVVM frameworks for our front end code, to develop more efficiently Provision of a modern customization infrastructure, to decouple gadgets from our code Participation beyond code and feature wishes Use of modern MVVM frameworks for our front end code Traditionally, Mediawiki has been focused on PHP. Over the last years, more and more interactivity via JavaScript has been used. In connection with the significant growth of the JavaScript ecosystem this could have meant quicker development and a clearer separation of concerns. However, since our solutions are mostly used in MediaWiki context, involving external developers has been difficult and so has been onboarding developers in core teams. I see a large opportunity in introducing modern MVVM libraries that are open source and not constrained to use in Wikimedia software and could build upon other's experiences as well as documentation - things that have been traditionally problematic in our isolated MediaWiki solutions. Strong contenders are React and vue.js. While the react ecosystem is larger, I would recommend vue for its better documentation and clear compartmental structure which hopefully helps us to avoid further isolated solutions. Provision of a modern customization infrastructure The introduction and larger use of a MVVM could also be a chance to provide clear frontend APIs for Gadgets. They currently use DOM-hacks, which break continuously and would not anyway not possible when using a modern frontend framework (due to DOM flushing). Why should bother, since we have a large user base in which different tasks are shared using specific tools, just like each manual work has many different specialized, often even customized tools. Additionally, gadgets/userscripts could provide a low-barrier opportunity to onboard new developers. Other organizations successfully show that user provided extensions can enhance an ecosystem with user driven innovation and help with onboarding developers, e.g. Firefox' and Chrome's WebExtensions as well as LibreOffice. I would like to work on finding a way fulfil the possibilites of gadgets and extend them while providing sustainable and secure infrastructure for doing so. Participation beyond code and feature wishes We already do extensive user research. A large area for expansion and further development is doing this research and sense making *with* the community. This may already be done, often implicitly, based on feature- or UI focused requests of community members. But this has large caveats: The solution may net be feasible or sustainable to implement. Furthermore, without understanding the underlying need, we risk building technical- and UX debt and give away the possibility of learning from our community. To achieve an active, needs-based involvement of communities in design and research we could build on existing participatory design methods. They could be used and integrated in our research and product planning frameworks. Clearly integrating community in up front research could enable us to gather needed knowledge, have community participation and reach a better understanding between Wikimedia Foundation and communities as well as of the communities among each other. I want to define future participatory design strategies to be used on our way towards 2030.
Markus Glaser	Code Review, Documentation, Gadgets, Software Development Practices, Templates, Third Parties	Supporting Third-Party Use of MediaWiki	Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community	Mediawiki needs a professional ecosystem There is a huge potential for MediaWiki development outside of the Foundation's organized tech world. Thousands of organisations are running MediaWiki on the internet or intranet. They are investing time and money to make it their platform for information sharing, knowledge management or collaborative work. Yet, a lot of the development and design work stays contained on those installations instead of being published and provided to the greater MediaWiki community. I think this is not because of seclusiveness of the authors, but because we make it hard for externals to contribute. So how can we tap into this potential? I think there are a number of measures we can take. Among others, these are: Support standard ways for code contribution. For example, a lot of developers do have a github account, and know the github workflow of forking and requesting pulls. However, there is currently no way for them to contribute their code directly, instead they have to set up with our gerrit infrastructure. This is a hurdle many will not take. Maintain extensions as a community. There are a lot of extensions which are not actively maintained by their authors. In order to get them working, you have to wait for the maintainer to +2 your code. Although I have +2 rights, it is not clear under which circumstances I should actually +2 code, nor is there a general review queue for extensions. We can establish a group of volunteers who review changes to extensions on a regular basis. Create a template and gadget repository. A lot of work goes into site customisation using gadgets, templates or on-site-CSS. There are brilliant solutions out there, but we do not have a structured way to centrally collect this content or even curate it. Make it attractive for professional developers and consultants build their projects on top of MediaWiki. For example by increasing the visibility of highly used extensions on MediaWiki.org, by providing good entry points for technical documentation or by adding automated quality checks to the extensions. There are already some initiatives pursuing the general goal of fostering an ecosystem, e.g. MediaWiki Stakeholders or the recently announced Enterprise MediaWiki Consortium. Together with the Foundation, they can encourage MediaWiki maintainers to contribute their ideas and code and be part of the MediaWiki world.
Derk-Jan Hartman	Complexity, Gadgets, Strategy, Tools, User Experience	Advancing the Contributor Experience	Evolving the MediaWiki Architecture	Growing and complexity Our strategy is pointing us towards a bold and inclusive world in terms of projects and people. Almost by definition this will lead to increased complexity, not simply of our technology, but also of how to deliver to and to enable people to make use of our technology. In the last few years we have spent energy in creating more api's and a more service oriented architecture. An area where we however have not made such major changes is how we design for and work with the front end of the software, which is where the majority of people are actually using all the other stuff we make. Here we continue to think in larger products and problems to solve, and quite often tend to fail and even clash with our own 'customers'. By taking on a more diverse strategy, we risk being even more vulnerable to this. I have two suggestions: Smaller engineering. Allowing more time for smaller projects, smaller bugs, smaller tests of ideas and refinement of existing software. Let's embrace the success of Community Wishlists and be closer to our communities by writing more Gadgets or tools (toolforge) when we can, instead of going for 'the big fix'. Have three 1 week tests instead of one 6 month beta. etc. Fix small bugs that annoy many and that make our website feel amateurish, and improve the experience for everyone. Working more often on the needs of smaller projects, giving them a bigger voice and sprucing up our own solutions by gaining a more diverse experience. Be closer to our communities by working nearer to them. The second point that we should work on, is to stop thinking of our platform as a website. It is a work environment for an increasingly diverse crowd. We have a limited amount of space on the screen and a huge amount of tasks that various people want to do. Gadgets and even more so userscripts are hugely helpful, but have long since become unmanageable. It is time to think beyond the simple APIs and widget kits. We need to take a step towards becoming an application environment. We need users to be able to install and use complete apps made from recognizable and reusable building blocks. I want to see and use Gadgets as my browser uses extensions. I want those extensions to put apps in recognizable and consistent spots, to allow for fullscreen or splitscreen views, to have a familiar UI, but without having to cram everything into the limited shared space that we have. Apps as gateways for diversifying the specific solutions we build.
Ryan Kaldari	Gadgets, Languages, Structured Data, Wiktionary	Next Steps for Languages and Cross Project Collaboration		How should MediaWiki evolve to support the mission? One of the greatest barriers to the spread of human knowledge is the barrier of language. While Wikipedia does a great job of supporting hundreds of languages, the amount of content available in most language Wikipedias is still paltry and has a small impact on the knowledge available to speakers of those languages. For a huge percentage of the world's population, the key to unlocking knowledge isn't discovering Wikipedia, but learning new languages. Even for English speakers, the impact of learning a new language can be life-changing and open up many new opportunities. The Wikimedia Foundation is the steward of one of the greatest repositories of information about language in human history, Wiktionary. Unlike all other dictionaries on Earth, Wiktionary aims to define (in 172 languages) all words from all languages. In other words, not just defining English words in English and French words in French, but also French words in English, English words in French, Latin words in Swahili, Mopan Maya words in Arabic, etc. It's ambitious aim is to be the ultimate Rosetta Stone for the human species. While Wikipedia is in some respects maturing and gradually yielding diminishing returns for more investment, Wiktionary is still a small and growing project that has yet to fulfill its potential or break into mainstream consciousness the way that Wikipedia has. While one of the impediments to Wiktionary reaching its potential is lack of structured data support, which is being worked on, there are many improvements that could be made in the meantime to improve the usefulness of the site to both readers and editors. These include converting many of the fragile gadgets and site scripts into maintainable extensions, customizing the user interface to more closely match what users expect from a dictionary site, and adding dictionary-specific tools to the editing interface. There is also unexplored potential with building apps around the Wiktionary data, including apps tailored around language learning. Now that the Wikimedia Foundation has nearly 100 software engineers (and dozens of volunteer developers), it should explore the potential of its lesser known projects, especially Wiktionary, which has the potential to actually make a large impact on the Foundation's mission and bring more of the sum of human knowledge to more people around the globe.
Niharika Kohli	Communities, Cross-wiki, Gadgets, Lua, New Users, Templates, Tools	Evolving the MediaWiki Architecture	Next Steps for Languages and Cross Project Collaboration	Investing in our communities This position statement captures my thoughts about why and how we should be investing in our communities. There are a lot of ways we can encourage and support them, that we currently don't. Prioritizing to build tools for our communities is a crucial step for long term survival of our projects. It's fairly common knowledge how a lot of our communities suffer from toxicity. It's incredibly hard for newcomers to edit, to stick around and stay engaged in the midst of the existing toxicity in the community. The problem frequently also exists in smaller communities. Just recently, the English wikipedia community has pushed WMF into implementing ACTRIAL and preventing brand new users from being able to create articles on the site. These are signs that all is not well with our communities. If we envision a future with an active, thriving editor community 15 years from now, we've to become more aware of how our communities function and do more to support them than what we do today. The problems also exists on the technical side. Communities without technical resources lose out on gadgets, templates, editing toolbar gadgets and so on. The editors on these wikis are still forced to do a lot of things the hard way. Non-wikipedia projects are probably the worst affected. Quite often our software projects also cater to the bigger projects. Often just wikipedias. I am sure we can't solve everything but I'm sure we can try to help solve at least some of the problems. We can invest in better tools for new users to create articles, to edit and experiment with wikitext markup. We can build a better "on boarding" experience for new users. For example, English wikipedia currently has "Article Creation Wizard"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_wizard) which is outdated, poorly maintained and very confusing a lot of times. We can think about a more standardized solution which would be useful across wikis. We can also try to showcase user contributions in a better way, to build user engagement. Various wikis have been striving to create and sustain "wikiprojects" since a while with the result that several big wikipedias have come up with their own homegrown solutions for it. These are things the Foundation can help with building and standardize it for all wikis. For the technical problems, there is a big backlog of projects which are long overdue. Global cross-wiki watchlists, Global gadgets, templates, lua modules have been asked for by the community since many many years now. There are a lot more such projects to be found on Phabricator and the wishlist survey. These are projects which can be building blocks in making our communities more sustainable and thriving places. They are big and important enough projects that should make it into the product roadmap of teams outside of Community Tech. Another important thing we should think about is tools. Some tools such as pageviews analysis is one of the most important volunteer-maintained tools out there. What happens when it stops being maintained? When is a tool important enough for the Foundation to start thinking about incorporating that functionality in an extension/core? These are all important discussions to be had.
Birgit Müller	Code Review, Collaboration, Communities, Documentation, Gadgets, Open Source, Refactoring, Tools	Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community	Evolving the MediaWiki Architecture	Refactoring the Open: First steps to get ready for the next level Wikimedia's technical environment has grown into a very complex system throughout the past 15 years. Measured in internet years, parts of the software are ancient. When implementing a new feature, refactoring of a piece of the (extended) MediaWiki software is often required first. Following this principle of a.) refactoring and b.) implementation of something new, I suggest to start the discussion of the future technology direction by reflecting (and possibly: refactoring) the current Open Source practices and processes within the Wikimedia context. A mono perspective won't let us survive (and is less fun, too) When we talk about "Open Source" within Wikimedia we're not only talking about free licenses and open code repositories. We're talking about global collaboration and the technical contributions of many: Through this, we ensure that the Wikimedia projects stay alive and evolve, that we constantly develop new ideas, that multiple and diverse perspectives shape the development of our infrastructure and tools. We are great in having ideas, and we are good in trying things out. But we still partly fail at prioritising the problems we know we have and address them accordingly. I believe that we should better maintain the Technical Community and find ways to grow by allocating stable code review resources from paid staff for volunteer and 3rd party developers improving the documentation of the code base providing a single entry point that is easy accessible for interested developers building up partnerships with Open Source communities we might share interests in the future with (for example, communities around audio, video or translation technologies) constantly take diverse perspectives into account by finding better ways to gather and address feedback from smaller language communities and non-Wikipedia sites being less Wikipedia-centric when it comes to research: Not yet existing or emerging communities might not be interested in creating articles, but in contributing data or multimedia content or in building tools to reuse data and multimedia content build more bridges across local wikis and increase knowledge of local requirements by fostering cross-wiki exchange (example activity: template Hackathon) increasing the knowledge of the requirements that come along with different languages (example activity: multilingual support conference) Open Source doesn't mean anything is possible - does it? We have established processes and regulations for contributions to MediaWiki itself. But we lack processes and practices for local developments to ensure both, the freedom and space to experiment for the Technical Community and the stability and reliability of tools for users. I believe that we should e.g. raise priority for implementing a code review process for JS/CSS pages on Wikimedia sites start thinking about a technical sysop user right make it clear which user scripts/gadgets/tools are maintained, which are stable and which are proofs of concept or prototypes (for example: provide a (central) 'store' of maintained gadgets/tools with different levels: "stable version", "experimental version" ...) Let's start refactoring.
Brion Vibber	API, Gadgets, JavaScript, Mobile, Security, Templates, Tools	Evolving the MediaWiki Architecture		Infrastructure for Open: Safe code sharing in the Wikiverse Wikipedia has always been a place where people build things, starting with MediaWiki itself... Talk pages were created out of formatting conventions manually followed. Templates and Lua modules grew out of users' need to automate common markup & text blocks. Gadgets came about to let users add new capabilities to their experience. To scale our users' ability to work, we need to build modern infrastructure and APIs for on-wiki code: templates, gadgets, and custom workflows. First, gadgets and templates need to be maintainable and sharable in a centralized place; copy-pasting doesn't scale. Integrate with "real developer" tools like git, so complex tools can be edited and archived off-wiki. Second, they need to be safer and more future-proof. Template & module output is in wikitext, a fragile format; consider separating sanitized "true" templates from the data sources. JS gadgets can access internal or deprecated APIs that may break ... or hijack a session as malware! We should create narrower APIs and run the gadgets in isolated JS contexts to provide fault isolation -- this would also enable using them in different contexts such as mobile apps, by implementing the same interfaces. Third, we need to make content "smarter" by giving it the ability to run interactive scripts safely -- a mix of what templates/modules and what gadgets can do. This can be used to make animated widgets for article pages, but more importantly could be used to implement discussion & editing workflows to supplement what you can do with just a talk page and a set of conventions. At a minimum, think of what people do with Google Forms to guide input, and let folks do that on-wiki. On-wiki tool-building is a "force multiplier" that lets people get more done by organizing themselves. Providing better tools for tool builders will lead to happier, more productive users working for our mission.