[Labs-l] A proposal for better tool discoverability

Wed Aug 13 15:56:02 UTC 2014

Also: Can the directory detect arrays? For example, in the "wikidata-todo"
tool, I have many smaller tools. I could make a file for each, but that
seems overkill.

Directory tool could do "object=>single tool", "array=>multiple tools in
one file".

Cheers,
Magnus

On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 4:53 PM, Magnus Manske <magnusmanske at googlemail.com>
wrote:

> Thanks Husky,
>
> I've added WDQ to try it. At what interval does it refresh?
>
> It might be helpful if I could structure (group) tools on the wiki page.
> Does the directory ignore not-well-formatted lines (e.g. headings)?
>
> Cheers,
> Magnus
>
>
>
> On Wed, Aug 13, 2014 at 4:15 PM, Hay (Husky) <huskyr at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Hey everyone,
>> for those who attended Wikimania, i hope you all had a wonderful time!
>>
>> One of the things that i've talked about at Mania with a few people is
>> the current way of 'tool discovery', or rather, the lack thereof.
>> We've seen really cool things done by the community, but i have a
>> feeling many of the tools go by unnoticed, simply because nobody knows
>> that they exist. Maybe they've been send around here or posted on IRC,
>> but after the initial interest many of them are forgotten and lead a
>> lonely life on our virtual servers.
>>
>> I think this is especially problematic for non-community members for
>> whom the tools might be very useful. For example, as a Wikipedian in
>> Residence and GLAM advocate i have sent numerous mails with links to
>> the various GLAM tools made by Magnus, stats.grok.se, etcetera.
>>
>> But, you might say, we run all these knowledge sites called wikis
>> right? And there are some pages there that list tools, don't they?
>> You're right, the community has put some efforts in a few pages (1).
>> However, IMHO, a wiki doesn't lend itself to easy tool discovery:
>>
>> * The format on how to describe a tool is unclear, thereby leading to
>> both very long and very short descriptions.
>> * It's not possible to easily search for tools in a certain category
>> (e.g. 'GLAM' or 'editcount').
>> * The categorization of tools leads to much clicking around,
>> distracting and confusing users.
>> * There's no way to sort results, for example by the number of people
>> using the tool.
>>
>> The biggest problem of all is the disconnection between the actual
>> code of the tool itself (hosted in a Git repo), and the description
>> advertising it. People update their tool to do something different (or
>> deprecate it), but they forget the documentation on the wiki, don't
>> remove it when the tool doesn't work anymore, etcetera.
>>
>> I believe we can, and should do better.
>>
>> THE PROPOSAL
>>
>> My proposal is to use the same mechanisms that already exist for
>> package managers such as NPM (2) or 'app stores', such as the Chrome
>> store (3). Basically this involes adding a small JSON file to your
>> project, including a few key properties such as 'title' and
>> 'description'. These files get indexed, and an easy to use frontend to
>> search to all the tools is provided to end users. You could imagine a
>> 'toolinfo.json' file to look something like this:
>>
>>     {
>>         "name" : "WikiDataQuery",
>>         "description" : "An API for Wikidata items and properties.",
>>         "url" : "http://wdq.wmflabs.org/",
>>         "keywords" : "wikidata, api, query",
>>         "author" : "Magnus Manske"
>>     }
>>
>> If you have a web-hosted tool, simply stick it in the root of your
>> tools directory so that it's reachable by the crawler. Whenever your
>> tool data changes, just update the file and the directory will
>> automatically update the directory site.
>>
>> The link to your toolinfo.json could be added to a Wiki page so that
>> it's easy to remove your tool from the directory or change the URL to
>> the JSON file.
>>
>> I'm a firm believer in putting code where your mouth is, so i've
>> hacked up a working tool directory here:
>>
>> http://tools.wmflabs.org/hay/directory
>>
>> Try searching for stuff, clicking on the labels. To add your own tool,
>> scroll the page down for instructions.
>>
>> Current this only lists my tools, but i hope that this directory will
>> soon grow with everything the Wikimedia community has to offer.
>>
>> I'm interested in your opinion in this proposal and, if you like it,
>> add a toolinfo.json to your project!
>>
>> Kind regards,
>> -- Hay / [[User:Husky]]
>>
>> 1: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Tools
>> 2: https://www.npmjs.org/
>> 3: https://developer.chrome.com/apps/manifest
>>
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>>
>
>
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