[Labs-l] A proposal for better tool discoverability

Fri Aug 15 11:44:51 UTC 2014

My thoughts were solely orbiting around Labs/Tools environment, where we
have all kind of tools/services right now.
Including bots, apis, abandoned tools & projects etc.

As you mentioned, your tool has a bigger scope, including non-labs tools
as well as stand-alone gadgets - this is not just ok, this is wonderful!
And for this approach the "service-only" description, as well as the
location in public accessible html dir is absolutely fine.
Beyond that - keep it simple - imho there's no need for further
structured data in your tool atm.

For Labs/Tools otoh, I keep my proposal upright:
- some (few) additional structured items like type of service, license &
techniques
- all offered services included in a Main Object with Labs specific data
- placed in tool's root directory, copied over automatically to
/public_html (for your tool)
- editable via console + web-interface/OAuth (easily realizable in Labs
environment)

Changed some things In this respect:
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Hedonil#Draft._.28Labs-_.29Tools-_Directory

Benefits would be
- both would be interoperable, while costs stay low for authors and admins
- wonderful easy-to-handle and flexible json cookies (if you find a use
case, you may also convert them to XML...)

-Hedonil

On 15/08/14 12:55, Hay (Husky) wrote:
> ....
>
> Hedonil wrote:
>> Wrote down some thoughts about the data structure of a unified directory service
> Thanks for spending time on thinking and writing down alternatives.
> I'm not quite sure about separating the code of the tool from the
> actual metadata. IMHO this will cause neglect on the author's part,
> because it will be very common to forget to update (or even write)
> metadata like that in a completely separate system. Having the
> metadata on the tool in a simple format, together with the code, will
> make sure tool authors will at least put a little bit of effort in
> keeping it up-to-date.
>
> One thing i'd like to mention in general: note that it's not at all
> required to host your tool on the toollabs instance to have it in the
> directory. If you have a tool living on your own server, a Javascript
> gadget living on a Mediawiki project, or even hard-to-find tools that
> are part of a standard Mediawiki installation feel free to add that as
> well to the tool directory. In the future we might have some kind of
> standard categorization, but for now i would like to first see how the
> directory evolves before we start introducing more properties.
>
> Kind regards,
> -- Hay / Husky
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