468:, confirming they had the technical community's trust to approve other developers' PageTriage patches. Having more developers with +2 rights for a repository is a big help towards improving its technical maintainability in the long term. Finally, Novem Linguae attended technical conferences and discussed PageTriage there with developers, product managers, and leadership. Sohom Datta's participation in the PageTriage project began after meeting Novem at a conference and working on a PageTriage bug report together.
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active volunteer developer community around PageTriage, both the WMF and PageTriage's volunteer developers feel that the extension is in a much better place than it was a year ago. We hope that this project can serve as a positive example of collaboration between the WMF and volunteer developers to make
Knowledge (XXG)'s tooling better.
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Going forward, the
Moderator Tools team has taken over as official maintainers of the codebase, and is continuing to provide code review and office hours for volunteer developers, as well as working on high priority bugs and potentially tackling more technical debt in the future. Between this and the
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had not been prioritized during that decade, and many of the technologies used in the software were at this point out of date or unique to this extension. It is not good for software in a large ecosystem such as MediaWiki to have unique technology, because it means that other MediaWiki developers are
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The WMF's
Moderator Tools product team began work internally to understand the problem space: How was PageTriage being used? What problems did it have? Why wasn't it being actively maintained? One of the big findings from these discussions was that the extension was in a poor technical state: it was
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It's fair to say that both the WMF and volunteers approached this collaboration warily. WMF staff were faced with an overwhelming set of bugs and a long list of requested features. On the community side, some NPP coordinators and volunteer developers had little experience working directly with WMF
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that it would be spending at least 3 months working on the PageTriage extension. The work would be focused primarily on technical modernisation, with a view to maintaining the toolset in the longer term, but the details were left open for the team to figure out over the coming months.
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in July 2022 as a call for help. The open letter asked the WMF to direct resources towards PageTriage, asking for more time to be spent fixing bugs and developing new features in the software. Gathering 444 signatures (becoming one of very few
English Knowledge (XXG) pages to achieve
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coverage. Weekly office hours and active discussions on
Discord meant that WMF and volunteer developers collaborated closely on defining and solving problems – feeling like one coherent team. New volunteers became involved, and
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to ensure that the
Foundation understood how the software was being used, and to identify any high priority workflow-breaking bugs which might need attention. At the same time, the team met with volunteer developers to
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The project was also an excellent opportunity to involve volunteer developers more in the MediaWiki technical community. PageTriage patches ended up being Novem
Linguae and MPGuy2824's first patches ever submitted to
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less likely to know how to support it. This made it very difficult for staff or volunteers to make improvements or changes, and it particularly wasn't an appealing prospect to throw more new features onto the pile.
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Another outcome of the open letter, and other community discussions from the past year, is that it encouraged the WMF to rethink how it receives community opinions for technical requests. The ongoing
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After the burst of work on PageTriage in 2019, because WMF and volunteer developers had not spent focused time on PageTriage for a number of years, issues began to arise. Workflows such as
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Over the course of these months, which spanned well beyond the original 3 months allotted, two collaborative processes took place to figure out the priorities. Patrollers
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This year the
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built a decade ago, and since then features had been added as needed, but without a coherent strategy or consistent technical choices. Tackling
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Following a widely supported community campaign which kicked off in 2022, technical updates and a new user interface have been deployed for the
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staff, and were concerned that the WMF would want to change the software's appearance too much, possibly disrupting patroller workflows.
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aim to review every newly created article produced by newer editors. To help tackle this large workload, specialised software (called
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components, giving it a much needed visual facelift! More information on the work achieved during this project can be found in the
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planning and discussions factored in lessons learned from the NPP open letter and PageTriage software improvement process.
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Over the following months, what ensued was a very productive collaboration between the
Moderator Tools team's engineers –
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New Page Patrol receives a much-needed software upgrade: A new model for collaboration between the WMF and the community?
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A full overview of the project and the updates posted over the course of this year can be found at
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Following this widespread support, the WMF's relatively new Chief
Product and Technology Officer,
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were arranged to brainstorm improvements to the new article creation process (such as the
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and Novem Linguae each attended a "Conversation with the Trustees" with the
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the various ways in which the codebase might be improved technically.
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We also hope that this can serve as an example of the power of the
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into the software, and adding a variety of requested features.
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Knowledge (XXG):Page Curation/2023 Moderator Tools project
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tagging had a tricky bug causing it to regularly fail.
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teams worked to improve the extension by incorporating
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New Page Patrol receives a much-needed software upgrade
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As a result of these mounting issues, NPP coordinator
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What is New Page Patrol? What software do they use?
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672:No comments yet. Yours could be the first!
744:Knowledge (XXG) Signpost archives 2024-06
460:-like process on Phabricator to receive "
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18:Knowledge (XXG):Knowledge (XXG) Signpost
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518:draft goals for next Fiscal Year
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692:putting together the next issue
447:Empowering technical volunteers
657:add the page to your watchlist
223:The English Knowledge (XXG)'s
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301:Community Affairs Committee
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68:File:Triage 041105 big.jpg
275:tagging were broken, and
384:Susana Cardenas Molinar
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441:project's final update
335:Future of the Wishlist
288:open letter to the WMF
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510:patrolling on Android
500:. That work includes
472:Looking to the future
316:2022–2023 annual plan
261:Articles for Creation
237:Page Curation toolbar
207:PageTriage software.
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654:To follow comments,
433:Special:NewPagesFeed
422:code, and improving
324:three video meetings
259:scores, integrating
233:Special:NewPagesFeed
71:Paramedics Worldwide
535:"Technology report"
225:new page patrollers
649:Discuss this story
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369:jointly prioritise
356:the team announced
45:← Back to Contents
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665:purging the cache
589:News from the WMF
574:Technology report
354:In January 2023,
312:Selena Deckelmann
305:Board of Trustees
88:Technology report
50:View Latest Issue
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690:needs your help
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604:Featured content
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364:were interviewed
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205:New Pages Patrol
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599:Recent research
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