Lua
3 statements.
| Author | Tags | Primary Session | Secondary Sessions | Position Statement |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 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wikipedia currently has "Article Creation Wizard"(https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Article_wizard) which is outdated, poorly maintained and very confusing a lot of times.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. |
| Thomas Pellissier Tanon | Analytics, API, Collaboration, JavaScript, Lua, Mobile, Multimedia, Structured Data, User Experience, Wikibase, Wikidata | Knowledge as a Service |
Title: Content structuration and metadata are keys to fulfil our strategy Content: The Wikimedia mouvement strategy is making a focus on serving more different kinds of knowledge and sharing them with allies and partners [1]. I believe that the most important ground work for reaching these goals is to focus on the outgoing project of moving MediaWiki from a "wikitext plus media file" collaboration system to a platform allowing people to be able to collaborate on many kind of contents and to organise them in a cohesive way. Two axes seem important to me to pursue this goal: 1. Support a broader set of different contents, not just wikitext, Wikibase items and Lua/JavaScript/CSS contents but also images, sounds, movies, books, etc., that should bee editable just like wiki text pages in order to allow people to improve them in a collaborative way. 2. Build platforms and tools allowing contributors to create and clean metadata about these contents in order to build together the broadest cohesive set of knowledge ever available and increase its reusability. Going in these directions would allow us to:
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| Raimond Spekking | Lua, OpenStreetMap, Wikidata | Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community | Knowledge as a Service |
tl;dr: Empower more Wikipedians [1] in using Lua, incl. invoking data from Wikidata, and data from the Data namespace on Commons. In the past 15 years it was relatively easy for every Wikipedian to create templates, and with the ParserFunctions to write some kind of simple program code. In 2013 we got Lua as real and powerful programming language. Since a short time it is possible to invoke data from Wikidata and a very short time to store/read data in/from the Data namespace on Wikimedia Commons. These are all good improvements and increases the possibilities in adding valuable data/information to the (often) high quality content of the German Wikipedia. But these techniques increases the requirements in technical knowledge to the Wikipedians. In other words: Substantial less Wikipedians are able to write Lua module than creating templates. As an active community member of the German Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons (and Wikidata) I see a real bottleneck in the situation, that we do not have enough Wikipedians with skills in Lua and the possibitiy how to invoke data from Wikidata & Co. Checking the Module namespace via RecentChanges for September 2017 on the German Wikipedia: Only 13 Wikipedians contributed to Lua code. Often I read on the Village Pump and related pages: "Sorry, but my to-do-list as volunteer is full until end of the year, I do not have the capacity to solve your problem." and so on. This is very frustrating for all sides. Other cool [3] projects, like integration of Maps via Kartographer, stucks because the German Wikipedia has not enough man power for these works As a result of this notice we have to create some help to empower more Wikipedians in using Lua, incl. invoking data from Wikidata, and data from the Data namespace on Commons. In Germany, Austria, and Switzerland it probably easier than in other countries because we can offer real-live workshops. In 2018 the team of the "Wikipedia:Lokal K" [2], a real-live supporting base for Wikipedia & Co, is planning, with the support of WMDE, some workshops for Wikidata. Same could be done for supporting Lua & Co. As originator of the "Technical Wishlist" [4] I am thinking about adding support for Lua modules & Co to the wishlist. On the summit I would like to discuss these and other solutions for this bottleneck.
[1] to be read as users of all sister projects [2] https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Lokal_K [3] My POV as active OpenStreetMap community member [4] https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Community_Tech/Community_Wishlist_Survey_description Originated by me in September 2013: https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Technische_W%C3%BCnsche/%C3%9Cber_das_Projekt |
