[...]

Like others, I have tried to get the Foundation to provide the page view data in a more accessible and local (as in toolserver/Labs) way. Like others, I failed. The last iteration was a video meeting with the Analytics team (newly restarted, as the previous Analytics team didn’t really work out for a reason; I didn’t inquire too deeply), which ended with a promise to get this done Real Soon Now™, and the generous offer to use the page view data from their hadoop cluster. Except the cluster turned out to be empty; I then was encouraged to import the view data myself. (No, this is not a joke. I have the emails to prove it.) As much as I enjoy working with and around the Wikiverse, I do have neither the time, the bandwidth, nor the inclination to do your paid jobs for you, thank you very much.

As the sophisticated reader might have picked up at this point, the entire topic is rather frustrating for myself and others, and being unable to offer a patchy, error-prone data set to GLAMs who have released hundreds of thousands of files under a free license into Commons is, quite frankly, disgraceful. The requirement for the Foundation is not unreasonable; providing what Henrik has been doing for years on his own would be quite sufficient. Not even that is required; myself and others have volunteered to write interfaces if the back-end data is provided in a usable form.

Of the tools I try to provide in the GLAM realm, some don’t really work at the moment due to the constraints described above; some work so-so, kept running with a significant amount of manual fixing. Adding 100.000 Wellcome Trust images may be enough for them to come to a grinding halt. And when all the institutions who so graciously have contributed free content to the Wikiverse come a-running, I will make it perfectly clear that there is only the Foundation to blame.