User talk:Tgr

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Wikisporadic Newsletter: September 2022

Wikispore lunch in Berlin

Wikisporadic, an Occasional Newsletter for our Germinating Community.

• Oral knowledge We held a session on oral knowledge and Wikispore as part of Options Space at Wikimedia Summit 2022 in Berlin, looking at options with several African affiliates to link out to cultural topics from Wikipedia(s). Some African communities are already doing oral knowledge documentation like the Nigerian community working on oral history as well as the growing Mozambican community working on oral history documentation in Makhuwa language. This is a way to provide more sources as well as digitize some oral parts of their history.
• Wikidata integration There is a plan to install the new UnlinkedWikibase extension, advancing the vision of Wikisprout and full Wikidata integration such as use in infoboxes.
• Movement strategy Using the Cargo and related extensions on Wikispore, work is underway to create a demo of Movement Strategy activities, adapting Baserow data from Wikimedia Summit.
• Halloween event As a Wikidata 10th Birthday event, there is hope to collaborate at the end of October with Wiki Cemeteries User Group on Grave Spore (see discussion), for maps and in-depth coverage of individual graves.

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Request for assistance

Recently Meta Adiutor was rolled out on Wikimedia Commons - despite several admins' concerns that there is no documentation for Commons. We are getting run over by the main Dev. on our Village Pump. I have put a summary on the Meta Adiutor discussion page. I think it is concerning. I am asking for your help. I am not sure this page will notify me of your replies, so please ping, or use my Wikimedia Commons talk page at https://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Ellin_Beltz We can't get a straight answer out of the Dev of what it's supposed to do or how it's supposed to do it and there's no documentation specific to Commons. The Dev doesn't seem to understand how different Commons is from the language wikis and is unable to tell us why we should learn to use a mysterious box. If it's really a great tool, we'd love to have it - but the way it's been presented it seems like he's trying to get a notch on every wiki and not really supporting the individual community after he's got his name there. Perhaps all the language wikis work the same and he feels Commons will be same also. But it is not. Maybe I am not understanding, but this feels very wrong and I am concerned that careless use could break or damage our part of the project. I have received no information about why it is better, useful, or even an improvement but I have been told it is many many times now. It was implied that I was non-supportive for expressing concern. I am not a technical person. I look forward to receiving some understanding about why this was steamrollered onto our project from our Village Pump. I think it should have been tested and administrative rights should be given only after community approval which is not what happened. Again, perhaps I am misunderstanding. But I have never seen anything like this in all my years on the projects. Sincerely yours, Ellin Beltz (talk) 06:15, 13 September 2023 (UTC)

Hi @Ellin Beltz! I guess you are referring to this discussion (a link would have been helpful).

Can you be more specific about how you think a gadget that users are free to use or ignore could "break or damage" Commons? There are very few actions in MediaWiki which aren't easily reversible (basically page import and merge), and as far as I know Adiutor doesn't support any of them. So IMO Commons interface administrators can just disable the gadget if it causes problems, with those problems being easily undoable.

Other than that, I don't see why enabling an (opt-in) gadget is a problem. People who like it better than existing tooling (or maybe prefer a tool they already know from other wikis how to use) will use it, people who do not will not. If there is enough uptake, its users will document it eventually; this is how cross-wiki gadgets usually get documented. It's nice if the developer has the capacity to write in-depth documentation specifically tailored to every wiki (including familiarizing themselves with that specific wiki's pre-existing tooling to give a point-by-point comparison), but not necessarily a very good use of tool developer time.

Wrt testing first, aside from whether that is desirable in the first place, it's unfortunately not really technically possible with gadgets. I hope that gets fixed eventually (you can find the relevant discussion at T36958), but unfortunately the gadget system, and more generally MediaWiki's support for user scripts and similar customizations, is mostly maintained by volunteers with limited capacity, so progress is slow. Tgr (talk) 13:01, 16 September 2023 (UTC)