Grants:Project/Rapid/-jem-/Precisions management/Report

Report accepted

This report for a Rapid Grant approved in FY 2019-20 has been reviewed and accepted by the Wikimedia Foundation.

To read the approved grant submission describing the plan for this project, please visit Grants:Project/Rapid/-jem-/Precisions management.
You may still comment on this report on its discussion page, or visit the discussion page to read the discussion about this report.
You are welcome to Email rapidgrants at wikimedia dot org at any time if you have questions or concerns about this report.

Goals

Did you meet your goals? Are you happy with how the project went?

I'm happy with the project and the goals were achieved. The tool is already available and in use. The current pandemic situation with work and personal changes has quite altered my plans regarding this project, and I haven't had the time I would have liked for users to test it in depth and make further adjustments, but I have already achieved the planned functionality, and improvements can be made in the future. There is more information and technical details in the help files in Spanish and in English, in addition to the source code linked on the main page.

Outcome

Please report on your original project targets.

Target outcome	Achieved outcome	Explanation
50 improved articles (by moving titles)	64 improved articles to date (2020-04-14)	Due to the changes in my time organization, as already explained, the first tests and actions could only be started on the last day, although with the incorporation of more users the numbers will increase; please check the current updated data here.

Learning

Projects do not always go according to plan. Sharing what you learned can help you and others plan similar projects in the future. Help the movement learn from your experience by answering the following questions:

What worked well?
- The execution times in the SQL queries to the database to obtain the lists of titles and redirections have turned out to be reasonable, despite my fears (less than ten minutes), and I have been able to use them, which allows for frequent updates as needed, instead of resorting to the dumps accessible on dumps.wikimedia.org, which are only updated once or twice a month and do not have all the necessary information in the same format.
- The clear separation of the tool in an asynchronous module without user intervention for updates, executable "in the background" as required, and a synchronous module for web interaction, which uses the updated data asynchronously, has proved to be an efficient solution in terms of code maintenance and the balance between functionality and page load time, which is acceptable even for the longest listings.
- The previous experience of previous granted tools and other personal programming projects has speeded up the resolution of specific problems, such as in particular the use of associative arrays instead of normal ones to drastically speed up text searches in asynchronous data processing, or the more appropriate identification of problematic details according to redirections.

What did not work so well?
- The number and variety of situations to review, confusing cases, etc. in the use of parenthesized precisions have turned out to be much greater than expected, at least for the case of Wikipedia in Spanish. This on the one hand makes a tool like this more necessary and important, but at the same time it makes desirable that it has more complexity, in order to provide more information to speed up the analysis of each case and more possibilities for its resolution. This is something that I will progressively address in my volunteer time.
- Related to the above, the management of redirections resulting from page moves and also those that point incorrectly to the same title with a precision between brackets, together with their incoming links, has also proved to be a sufficiently complex problem, so for practical reasons I have chosen to address it in depth in a future redirection management tool of my own, instead of this one.
- In the initial tests with the SQL queries, I had several problems with interruptions in the execution from the Toolforge servers after a few minutes from its start, which finally motivated my division into three phases of execution of the asynchronous updates. I don't know if there were problems of high resource consumption attributable to me, or if a strong restriction in resource consumption exists and is necessary, but it is something that I will have to take into account in future projects and even in the asynchronous maintenance of this same project.
- Giving priority to the use of standard solutions within the PHP language, such as ini files compatible with its built-in functions, and avoiding excessive modularization, has meant some extra work in reorganizing data files and adapting the code.

What would you do differently next time?
- Based on the experience of my two previous projects, extended in the same way with this one, and my desire to continue making them compatible with my usual volunteer time in the Wikimedia projects, I have been able to see that it is common for some problems to be related to others, that planning and organization can be complex, and that often the demands and needs in the short term prevent the preparation of the medium and long term. I have learned all this and it will be important when dealing with future projects and proposals.

Finances

Grant funds spent

Please describe how much grant money you spent for approved expenses, and tell us what you spent it on.

Per the grant request, the full amount of 975 euros paid the programming time.

Here is a summary of the breakdown of the time distribution, after adjusting the initial plan to the real work needed, and including programming language details:

Development of asynchronous data updating system, SQL queries, and file saving, PHP: 12 hours
Creation and testing of configuration files for eswiki usage, PHP ini-files: 1 hour
Development of menus and general interface, HTML/CSS, Javascript and PHP: 12 hours.
Development of internal move module and its communications from the web interface, PHP and Linux: 3 hours.
Development of page (form) for project requests, bug reports or general feedback for all my tools, PHP: 3 hours.
Final testing and fixing: 4 hours.
Documentation (help text, source code organization and publishing, logging options in PHP): 4 hours.

Total: 39 hours - Rate: 25 euros/hour - Total amount: 975 euros

Remaining funds

Do you have any remaining grant funds?

No, there are no remaining funds.

Anything else

Anything else you want to share about your project?

This tool can be improved in many aspects over time, as the area it covers has proven to be interesting and complex, and it will also be very important that communities, starting with Wikipedia in Spanish, are aware of this and establish consensus that can be transferred to the tool and give it more possibilities of use, including the making of massive changes that, for now, could be problematic or have an unwanted impact. From there, it will be interesting to take the idea to other Wikimedia projects, at the same time as my previous granted tools. And seeing these three projects together, I can make an overall positive balance, both in terms of results and learning, and I consider them an important and necessary step in my commitment to the Wikimedia movement, which will allow me to evaluate now, with more information and time, how to address the next phases and collaborations that, no doubt, I will continue to develop, including being able to make an effective maintenance of my granted and also "volunteer" tools. Thanks in advance to the WMF for their support to date, and in those future steps.