Grants:IdeaLab/Introduce "WMF Endorsed" badge for tools and scripts
Project idea edit
What is the problem you're trying to solve? edit
There are a lot of tools of various degrees of completeness and usefulness that solve a lot of Wikipedia's day-to-day tasks and challenges. Category and article browsing, maintenance bots, competition jury tools, statistics tools, clean-up tools, reference tools etc etc. A lot of disconnected and uncoordinated people build these tools. A lot of effort and talent is split and repeated, instead of being focused.
It is also difficult to find a good tool. After you find something and use it / improve it, you discover something much better that you haven't heard of because it was used on e.g. Italian WP, not the EN/RU/DE wikis that you frequent.
What is your solution? edit
WMF should invest into co-ordinating them and uniting efforts so that the best tools from all Wikipedias are categorized and listed in one place, as well as receive support from community AND the Foundation in terms of engineering, design, integration, hosting, translation, dissemination. So e.g. WMF says "we see that this is a useful tool used by a lot of people and we will support that with WMF resources of 0.2 PHP engineers on a monthly basis to make sure it is current and not broken even if the original creator abandons it for any reason". WMF should also host the tool and repositories and maybe include the best into WP functionality in the end.
Project goals edit
Get WMF to assign X resources to a project like this
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Participants edit
Endorsements edit
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Do you want to submit your idea for funding from the Wikimedia Foundation?