Toolhub/About
The Toolhub project is an effort to catalog the various software tools used in the Wikimedia movement. This project was led by the Wikimedia Technical Engagement team. Research and planning for the project began in January 2018. Work on building the initial software began in August 2020. The first usable version of Toolhub shipped in October 2021.
Toolhub  | |
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| Discover new tools, promote their use in your wiki community, help improve them by contributing data. | |
| Group: | Wikimedia Technical Engagement |
| Team members: | Bryan Davis, Raymond Ndibe, Slavina Stefanova
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Background
Tools are used by our community for many different purposes, including semi-automatically making many edits quickly, presenting data about wiki content, and managing outreach events and contests. Tools fill in the functional gaps not covered by the wiki software itself; without tools, our work would be so much harder. Different efforts have attempted to catalog all of the different tools used in the community, each addressing different aspects of tools and their users. For the first three months of 2018, the Cloud Services team investigated 14 tool cataloguing efforts (as many as we could find) and compared them on 23 different features and 24 different data attributes. We also interviewed tool developers and learned more about how tools are developed and promoted.
As a result of this process, we have come up with a preliminary blueprint of what a useful, comprehensive catalog of Wikimedia tools might look like. Our foundation will be Hay's Tool Directory, which describes over 450 tools through tool description files hosted on wikis and code repositories that are then periodically crawled. Based on our conversations with community members, including at the Wikimedia Conference in Berlin, we will evolve the data model used by Hay's Tool Directory to allow for richer tool descriptions, including a new annotation system to allow community members to annotate tool descriptions with additional metadata fields. From there, we will create a new API to add and modify this data, open for developers to use to create their own interpretations and remixes of the Toolhub data corpus.
For more detailed information, see the Use cases, Data model, and Roadmap sub-pages.
Feedback
We invite you to leave feedback on the talk page.
Updates
See Progress reports for more recent and detailed updates.