Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2021-10-31/Technology report
Wikimedia Toolhub, winners of the Coolest Tool Award, and more
Introducing Wikimedia Toolhub
Wikimedia Toolhub is a new and improved way to find Wikimedia tools. Toolhub allows users to browse, categorize, and search tools. Tools are web applications that can do many things; some examples are the XTools edit counter and CopyPatrol. At press time, the new Toolhub indexes 1500 of these tools, with many of them having origins in the Wikimedia volunteer community rather than being created by Wikimedia Foundation staff.
While new users almost always use Wikipedia's default settings and features, experienced editors, community outreach organizers, researchers, automated process users, and especially curious hobbyists have specific needs beyond routine website offerings. Meeting many of these needs requires data storage or processing beyond what MediaWiki offers, and consequently, must be accomplished in off-wiki software. Tools meet many of these needs, and Toolhub now provides a convenient way to find the right tool for a given purpose. Perhaps Toolhub will make some tools more popular, resulting in more support for them from both the community and the Foundation.
Previous tool directories, like Hay's tools, were ad hoc and less comprehensive. Continuing the history lesson, developers used to host tools on Toolserver, a service of Wikimedia Deutschland, but now most tools are hosted on Toolforge, a service of the Wikimedia Foundation.
Toolhub can be found at http://toolhub.wikimedia.org. – B and E
Cool Tools Award 2021
The Coolest Tool Award is an annual award ceremony showcasing the Wikimedia tools that the community nominates for being useful and worth publicizing. Previous winners of this prize are now indexed in the Wikimedia Toolhub, whereas before, the various tools which won prizes or were nominated could not be found anywhere in a single list.
Nominations for the Coolest Tool Award 2021 closed 27 October. However, watch the page for prize announcements, or in wiki-spirit, post messages on relevant talk pages to help the judges in the competition make good evaluations for what tools to recognize. – B
Topic subscriptions
You can now "subscribe" to a discussion and get notifications for new replies in it! This is a very exciting change. This feature was implemented by the Editing Team as part of the Talk pages project. We appreciate their hard work. You can enable this feature, which is part of the Discussion Tools beta, by checking the "Discussion tools" checkbox under Preferences → Beta features and clicking "Save". – E
In brief
Meetings
You can join the technical advice meeting on IRC. During the meeting, volunteer developers can ask for advice. The meeting takes place every Wednesday from 4:00–5:00 p.m. UTC. See how to join here.
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