Content Partnerships Hub/Software/Pattypan

Content Partnerships Hub

Improving the Wikimedia movement’s work with content partners

Pattypan

Pattypan is a tool for uploading large sets of images which has much lower technical requirements than the command line tools. It has been used by GLAM institutions and others to upload over 1.2 million images to Wikimedia Commons which are viewed over 80 million times a month across Wikimedia projects.

Development Plan

The primary task is to help volunteer developers to fix the issues with Pattypan that made it unusable for GLAM institutions. After that we may look into less critical bugs and enhancements that would improve the tool.

Our work

Component packaging

Our focus was on packaging Pattypan, which was requested by the volunteer developer. There was an issue that arose with newer version of Java no longer including JavaFX. This now had to be packaged in the JAR file to not require the end user to download and setup them separately.

Having a single, self contained, executable file helps not only when the tool is used by end users, especially those with less technical knowledge. It also makes testing for other issues easier during development.

Stand alone executable for Windows

The aim is to create a stand alone executable, i.e. a single file that can be run without the need of any extra components. This will make it even easier to run Pattypan compared to the JAR solution mentioned above.

Windows is the primary OS for this initiative, but hopefully a lot of the process can be reused for other OSes.

This initiative is being supported by Abes.

Log

Here follows a log of noticeable events concerning the development.


Date	Event
2022-11-15	Started work on stand alone executable.
2022-02-03	Package components for Windows in the JAR file.
2022-02-01	Package components for Linux in the JAR file.
2021-12-23	Started work on packaging components in the JAR file.