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:

A screenshot highlighting the Tool Type and UI language filter boxes in the Toolhub UI
Existing categories shown in the Toolhub UI


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

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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

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

Questions about specific categories

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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