Product and Technology Advisory Council/Unsupported Tools Working Group

The Wikimedia Foundation announces the formation of a working group for prioritizing and reviewing requests for support of unsupported extensions, gadgets, bot and tools. It will be a focused workstream that will prioritize existing requests for the unsupported items rather than requests for new features or improvements to currently supported features, extensions, gadgets, and tools.

Rationale

In FY24-25, the Wikimedia Foundation did a trial effort to improve extensions and volunteer created tools through carefully scoped, limited time and budget contracts. This resulted in the following projects being identified and completed:

• Not owned: Account Vanishing Automation: Fully automated account vanishing from mobile apps, freeing up time from volunteers and T&S/Legal staff.
• Owned: Temporary Accounts Compatibility: Several extensions were made compatible with Temporary Accounts.
• Owned: SecurePoll Scalability Improvements: Improved infrastructure to support broader project deployment. This project supported volunteers who worked in the expansion of SecurePoll as a tool deployed on any wiki that needs to conduct elections for roles like Arbitration committees or admins.
• Not owned: Wikilink Updates: Tool used by Wikipedia Library to provide impact data to external partners.
• Owned: Nuke Extension Improvements: Improvements to Nuke extension that otherwise was in maintenance mode. The project is documented on MediaWiki wiki.
• Owned: Graphs implementation: Replaced the former insecure Graph extension with an updated tool, for the purpose of displaying graphs on Wikipedia.

How it will function

During the initial phase of the working group's operation we expect to use a similar format like last year to handle a well scoped set of requests that can have a meaningful impact on improving a select few technical workflows. It will also be an opportunity to learn how we can collaboratively review and prioritize work on unsupported tools towards a more predictable response process.

We expect the working group to prioritize based on:

• Unsupported or unmaintained status for an extension, gadget or tool
• Measurable impact to readers or volunteers if the work is done
• Feasibility of completing the work within a 3 to 4 month time period

For all working group members, participation is required in the following:

• Periodic prioritization of unowned tool requests, including from the Community Wishlist
• Review of progress on prioritized requests at periodic intervals as per the schedule of work delivery.
• Participation in community forums to report on and discuss prioritized work.

We also welcome participation from all committee members in:

• Periodic triage of incoming requests
• Create, collaborate on or review specifications for work to be done on prioritized requests.
• Review completed work from contractors and staff for alignment with specifications.

Once we have specifications, then:

• Prioritized work with specifications will be reviewed by product and engineering staff for scope and feasibility.
• Once reviewed and approved, this work will be handed to contractors, Community Tech team or teams with available Essential Work capacity for completion.

Delivery timelines will be based on complexity and availability of contractors or teams to do the work. We believe we can meet or exceed the rate of work completed in FY24-25 going forward with the help of a working group.

Working Group membership

• Committee member: Mike Peel (English Wikipedia, Commons)
• Committee member: Sohom Datta (Wikisource, Commons, PTAC, English Wikipedia)
• Committee member: Joe Mabel (Commons, English Wikipedia)

Staff working group support

• Cormac Parle
• Joy Sengupta
• Kadeem Khan
• Benedict Udeh

Updates

October 2025

• The Working Group has shortlisted 5 tools, namely Video2Commons, CropTool, PattyPan/OpenRefine, UploadWizard, VicuñaUploader, FlickreviewR as important tools to focus on within the scope of "upload-related tools". After consultation from WMF folks (and other stakeholders), we determined that CropTool had active support from the Wikiproject Med Foundation, OpenRefine and UploadWizard similarly have had WMF-funded updates recently and FlickreviewR seems generally stable as a tool. Overall, the group gravitated towards towards eithier building a user-friendly replacement for PattyPan and VicuñaUploader or improving Video2Commons.

• The Working Group has selected Video2Commons(V2C) as the first unsupported tool to focus on for this pilot cycle. The group will work together to explore improvements and potential support options for V2C over the next few months. Updates and outcomes will be shared on this page as the work progresses.

September 2025

• The working group will be selecting a Commons tool for the first round of prioritization. The listening tours with Commons focus surfaced many requests for help with unsupported tools (in addition to other needs) that influenced the choice.