Toolhub/Progress reports/2022-04-22

Report on activities in the Toolhub project for the week ending 2022-04-22.

Code updates

Raymond made a technical debt improvement by creating a custom context helper for creating revisions.
Bryan patched a bug causing 301 redirects in the production metrics collection pipeline.
Slavina patched a bug related to list editing where some edits were not triggering reactive display changes in the effected lists.

Controlled vocabulary / taxonomy

The team spent more time working with Tricia on the idea of controlled vocabularies for use in annotations and other toolinfo attributes. Tricia has reviewed the prior work by Harej as well as a number of other lists attempting to classify tools produced by community members and Foundation staff. One insight from Tricia's review is that rather than seeking to create a single category hierarchy attempting to cover multiple conceptual themes (who does the tool help, where does the tool work, what does the tool do, ...) we would be better served by creating an attribute and vocabulary per theme. This is one of those things that seems fairly obvious once you read the write up on why, but probably would have evaded Bryan's analysis because of preconceptions about how Wikimedians are used to the leaky "category" abstraction used in MediaWiki.

Discussions are continuing on how we can best document and discuss Tricia's insights with various communities within the Wikimedia movement. The ultimate goal of this work is to make it easier for folks to find tools within the catalog by making it easier to browse and refine search results based on these specialized vocabularies.

Wrap up

The team is planning a new release that will include exposing annotations in the user interface and content moderation and patrolling improvements. We are also starting to think about what we can do at the upcoming Wikimedia Hackathon 2022 to promote Toolhub's features and needs with the technical community. If you have ideas, let us know!