Toolhub/Data model/Feedback

The goal of this page is to gather feedback from the community on the Toolhub taxonomy.

The formal feedback period for this is now closed. You can still leave comments, but they won't be considered for the initial production version of the Toolhub taxonomy.

Toolhub makes it easier for Wikimedians to find tools to use in their work. It is a catalog of 1500+ tools used by a wide range of Wikimedia contributors: editors, developers, patrollers, researchers, admins and more.
The Toolhub data model describes what pieces of information Toolhub records contain about tools.
A taxonomy is a set of categories and rules about what type of data goes into each category. To better describe tools, and to make it easier to browse for tools in different ways, we are proposing a set of categories that can be added to the data model. By creating a small, standardized set of categories, we can ensure that tools are grouped together and easier to find than if they were just tagged with uncontrolled keywords.

We want to make finding and categorizing these tools as easy as possible. The taxonomy is at the heart of how tool search works, and your feedback would help improve it. Whether you are a current user of Toolhub or hearing about it for the first time doesn't matter – your input is valuable and much appreciated either way!

The primary use for these categories is to facilitate browsing, grouping, and filtering of tools. For example, these categories could be added as additional filtering options for browsing tools in the Toolhub user interface:

To learn more about the process and the principles that informed the work on the taxonomy, take a look at the Design and Research page.

How to provide feedback

Use the discussion page to provide responses to the questions on this page.

When providing feedback, please consider letting us know if you belong to any of these audiences:

Admins
Organizers and program coordinators
Editors and content contributors
Readers and content consumers
Researchers
Developers
Other

The period for providing feedback ends on August 21, 2022.

High-level Questions

Do these categories (attributes) make sense? Do you feel like you understand what the labels (values) in each category mean? (are the values sensible?)
Are there values that seem useless / you can't imagine why it would matter or be useful for cataloging or discovering tools?
Are there values that are missing?

Questions about specific categories

Tasks category

Is "fixing" content more like Editing or more like Creating / Generating new content? Or do people generally consider it to be more like cleanup, closer to tasks like archiving unused pages or cleaning up sandboxes?
See the list of concepts that are grouped together as "Patrolling" – is that grouping too many concepts together?
How do you feel about the number of values and what they capture? Is it too overwhelming? Should we try to make them even broader groupings? For reference: here is the even bigger list of terms that was used to generate this controlled vocabulary.

Platforms category

Multiple of these values are already represented in the uncontrolled "tool type" field. Do we think it's worth having a controlled attribute for this concept?

Programming languages category

Would you use this attribute to look for projects to contribute to based on your skills or learning goals?
Would you want this attribute to be broadened to include frameworks like Flask, Django, etc?

Subject domains category

This list of values came out of review of existing and past tool categories/lists -- it is far from covering the full range of topic domains that exist in the Movement. It's proposed here because there are multiple tools made for these specific domains, and past creators of lists of tools often included an attribute to try to capture this concept. Is there something crucial that is missing, or one of these values that you really think should be removed?
Various categorization schemes for this semantic area exist -- should we use one of them?