OpenStreetMap

2 statements.

Author	Tags	Primary Session	Secondary Sessions	Position Statement
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
Sam Wilson	Drupal, OpenStreetMap, Third Parties, Volunteer Developers, WordPress	Supporting Third-Party Use of MediaWiki	Growing the MediaWiki Technical Community	tldr: Encourage use of MediaWiki outside WMF projects, because does so furthers the mission (and improves the software). MediaWiki is primarily a tool that helps the Wikimedia movement. The movement is not primarily about MediaWiki, but MediaWiki is the central tool with which we are currently fulfilling our mission. Lots of other people use MediaWiki too, but their needs are not the focus of WMF development. I think we should do more to encourage 3rd party use of MediaWiki, and in doing so broaden the developer community and end up with higher-quality software that is easier to use for more people. Our mission is about empowerment and education, and people running their own wikis should be seen as part of that. Just because content isn't hosted on WMF servers doesn't mean it's not part of the movement. I imagine a future in which MediaWiki is as common for collaborative websites as WordPress is for blogs, and people don't have to rely on Facebook, YouTube, GitHub, etc. to host their content. A couple of parallels (sort of): OpenStreetMap hosts the central database of their map, but they actively discourage people doing anything other than editing on the OSM infrastructure. Instead, there is a large ecosystem of tools and systems for serving that data. This is mainly because it would be impossible for OSM to provide the bandwidth and required formats etc. for all the possible uses - similarly, the set of Wikimedia sister projects are never going to provide every wiki that people want. Automattic runs wordpress.com and also manages the opensource development of WordPress; the latter seemingly in conflict with the former, but because of the long history (and relative late-starting of wordpress.com perhaps) the software has remained a favorite of self-hosted websites. (I'm ignoring the obvious security arguments for a now.) One reason that MediaWiki is not better for 3rd party users could be that there are not all that many non-WMF people making a living out of developing for it, at least not in comparison with other web frameworks (Drupal, WordPress, etc.). WordPress had to be easy to install on cheap web hosts because that's all there was; MediaWiki seems these days to only have that characteristic as a historical hangover, and it could well end up moving away from being aimed at amateur sysadmins all together. Perhaps there's a fundamental clash between the scale requirements of the WMF sites vs. the ease-of-administration requirements of 3rd party wikis - but if there's a choice to be made, it should be explicit and well-communicated. At the moment, it feels like it's happening by attrition.