User:BDavis (WMF)/Sandbox/Toolhub

Toolhub
Create an authoritative and well promoted catalog of Wikimedia tools
Group:	Wikimedia Technical Engagement
Team members:	Bryan Davis, Srishti Sethi Advisors Giuseppe Lavagetto, Keegan Peterzell, Sam Reed Past members James Hare

The Toolhub project is an effort to catalog the various software tools used in the Wikimedia movement. This project is being 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 is expected in the first half of 2021.

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

• 4 September 2020: Work on this project started again in August 2020 with a goal of releasing a basic version of Toolhub by June 2021.
• 30 June 2018: Version 1.1.0 of the toolinfo metadata schema is now published! Thank you to the 12 people who contributed feedback.
• 26 June 2018: Wireframes for Toolhub are now available for comment. Please review and leave feedback in any language.
• 7 May 2018: We have released the proposed data model. Please review and leave feedback in any language.
• 31 March 2018: We're happy to announce this project to the public!