Toolhub/Use cases

This page attempts to describe the use cases and personas Toolhub is meant for and why. Note that Toolhub might not serve every possible use case, especially in the earlier stages of the project.

Tool users

Our communities have developed countless tools for countless purposes, including for using content and contributing to it. Contributions to the Wikimedia projects take many forms, including written contributions, media uploads, data curation, source text transcriptions, vandalism patrol, quality assurance, administration and functionary work, dispute resolution, and other forms not documented here. Many contributions make use of custom workflows developed by the various communities. including those that require making manual edits to various wiki pages and those that are facilitated by software such as tools. Tools are often designed to work in very specific contexts; for instance, there is an archive search service specifically for Chinese Wikipedia. Given the number of tools out there, their purposes, and the intended audiences for those tools, there needs to be a way for tool users to find what they are looking for.

As a tool user:
- I would like to be able to leave feedback to the tool developer and to ask for help when I need it.
- I am interested in volunteering to help others with using a particular tool.
- I want to help improve the tool catalog by editing descriptions, adding annotations, and leaving endorsements and reviews.
As a contributor to Wikimedia projects:
- I want to find tools that make it easier for me to contribute.
- I need tools that enhance the quality of larger contributions, or make it easier for me to efficiently carry out many small edits.
- I need tools to identify quality issues and to carry out large migrations of content to projects such as Wikimedia Commons.
As a researcher, I want to gather metrics and raw data on participation, usage, etc. on Wikimedia projects.
As a reader, I want to find tools that recommend articles and new ways to experience Wikimedia content.
As an affiliate leader, I need to find tools that will let me compute metrics to measure my organization’s performance, with many of these metrics coming directly from the Wikimedia projects.
As a Wikimedian in Residence, I need to find tools to help me measure the impact of my work on Wikimedia projects.
As a program manager, I want to know what tools to use as part of my work, including training tools and metrics tools that make programmatic and reporting work easier.

Tool developers

Tool developers often volunteer their time for free to create something that helps others. Toolhub will help make tool development a satisfying experience by making it easier for developers to connect with users, each other, and resources such as documentation.

As a tool developer:
- I want others to know about and use the tools I develop.
- I want to be able to reach out to my users and gather feedback from them.
- I want to be able to broadcast updates to tool users.
- I want easy access to metrics related to my tool.
- I want to be able to connect to a community of fellow tool developers.
- I want my tool's interface and documentation translated into different languages.
- I want to identify opportunities to volunteer my time for developing other tools.
- I want one central place where I can find git repositories, bug trackers, technical documentation, discussion fora, etc. related to particular tools.

Other considerations

Mobile

While many tools were originally designed for desktop use only, many newer tools also work on mobile. However, there is no straightforward way to discover which tools these are. Since tools often serve to make contributing to Wikimedia projects easier, it follows that a directory of mobile-friendly tools will make it easier to contribute to Wikimedia projects on mobile.

As a mobile user:
- I need navigation aids that are designed with my device in mind.
- I want to explore opportunities to contribute to Wikimedia projects (or consume content from them) in ways that are optimized for my device.

Languages that are not English

Billions of people, including many Wikimedians, do not speak English. Wikimedia has a global audience, so it makes sense for the Toolhub to be usable by an international audience. Design decisions were made with internationalization in mind, for example by emphasizing the use of controlled vocabularies that can be translated into different languages. Additionally, the current tool ecosystem is highly fractured, with English tools and non-English tools rarely overlapping. Toolhub is designed to describe tools in more languages than just English.

As a tool user who speaks a language other than English:
- I need software interfaces to be available in my preferred language(s).
- I want to know what tools have interfaces available in my preferred language(s).
- It would be interesting to know what opportunities I have to translate tools between English and my preferred language(s).

Product teams

Product teams, including those at the Wikimedia Foundation, will be able to use tool endorsement data and other usage metrics to figure out which tools the community relies on the most. This can help teams prioritize their work, for instance, by working on building a feature that expands on the functionality of an existing tool.