[Langcom] Please read: Fixing Incubator

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Hi,

The way in which the Incubator works is extremely outdated. It is
considerably more difficult to write there than to write in a usual
Wikipedia domain. This is unfair, and there is no good reason for it. Some
time ago I wrote a proposal for a thorough overhaul of how the Incubator
works.

Very briefly, my proposal is:
* Instead of putting all the languages in one place, create a wiki for each
new language.
* This wiki will not be a full-fledged domain that is fully equal to
Wikipedia. The URL will look differently, and it will be possible to delete
it easily if the wiki turns out to be problematic for any reason.
* However, this wiki will support all the usual functionality of a wiki:
user accounts shared with Wikipeia in other languages, Wikidata
connectivity, extensions, templates, Visual Editor, Content Translation,
etc.
* The wiki will not demand the convoluted techniques that the Incubator
demands, such as "Wp/abc/" prefixes.
* If the wiki functions well and the Langcom approves it, it will be
converted to a full-fledged domain.
* (This applies to all Incubator projects and not only Wikipedia.)

For more details, see:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T165585

The proposal is over a year old, but it didn't get a lot of responses from
Language Committee members. I think that the time is ripe for starting to
execute it, but to convince the right engineers and managers to do it, it
would be nice to get some endorsements first.

If you support it, please leave a comment there. (If you don't know how to
leave a comment in Phabricator, please contact me.)

If you have any reservations, please leave a comment there as well, or
reply to this email.

Getting a unanimous endorsement email from all the Langcom members, or at
least the active ones, will be particularly nice, but only if everybody
actually agrees, of course :)

Thank you!

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · א־מ֮י׹ אֱל֎ישׁ֞ע אַהֲךוֹנ֎י
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

[James Heilman]

Sounds like a good move to me.

J

On Tue, Jul 24, 2018 at 5:09 PM Amir E. Aharoni <
***@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

> Hi,
>
> The way in which the Incubator works is extremely outdated. It is
> considerably more difficult to write there than to write in a usual
> Wikipedia domain. This is unfair, and there is no good reason for it. Some
> time ago I wrote a proposal for a thorough overhaul of how the Incubator
> works.
>
> Very briefly, my proposal is:
> * Instead of putting all the languages in one place, create a wiki for
> each new language.
> * This wiki will not be a full-fledged domain that is fully equal to
> Wikipedia. The URL will look differently, and it will be possible to delete
> it easily if the wiki turns out to be problematic for any reason.
> * However, this wiki will support all the usual functionality of a wiki:
> user accounts shared with Wikipeia in other languages, Wikidata
> connectivity, extensions, templates, Visual Editor, Content Translation,
> etc.
> * The wiki will not demand the convoluted techniques that the Incubator
> demands, such as "Wp/abc/" prefixes.
> * If the wiki functions well and the Langcom approves it, it will be
> converted to a full-fledged domain.
> * (This applies to all Incubator projects and not only Wikipedia.)
>
> For more details, see:
> https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T165585
>
> The proposal is over a year old, but it didn't get a lot of responses from
> Language Committee members. I think that the time is ripe for starting to
> execute it, but to convince the right engineers and managers to do it, it
> would be nice to get some endorsements first.
>
> If you support it, please leave a comment there. (If you don't know how to
> leave a comment in Phabricator, please contact me.)
>
> If you have any reservations, please leave a comment there as well, or
> reply to this email.
>
> Getting a unanimous endorsement email from all the Langcom members, or at
> least the active ones, will be particularly nice, but only if everybody
> actually agrees, of course :)
>
> Thank you!
>
> --
> Amir Elisha Aharoni · א־מ֮י׹ אֱל֎ישׁ֞ע אַהֲךוֹנ֎י
> http://aharoni.wordpress.com
> ‪“We're living in pieces,
> I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬
> _______________________________________________
> Langcom mailing list
> ***@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/langcom
>


--
James Heilman
MD, CCFP-EM, Wikipedian

[Santhosh Thottingal]

I support the idea in general. Do you have any proposal about the existing
incubator and migrating the whole content and related data to new wikis? It
does not sound an easy task.

--
Santhosh Thottingal | àŽžàŽšàµàŽ€àµ‹àŽ·àµ àŽ€àµ‹àŽŸàµàŽŸàŽ¿àŽ™àµàŽ™àµœ
Typeface designer and Language computing professional,
Senior Software Engineer at Wikimedia Foundation Language Engineering
thottingal.in | smc.org.in

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2018-07-25 6:19 GMT+03:00 Santhosh Thottingal <***@gmail.com
>:

> I support the idea in general. Do you have any proposal about the existing
> incubator and migrating the whole content and related data to new wikis? It
> does not sound an easy task.
>

Thanks.

Migrating existing incubators is probably one of the easiest things to do.
When a new domain is approved and created, all the pages from the Incubator
in that language are imported there, with automatic replacement of
"Wp/xyz/" prefixes. As far as I know, it is a fairly easy, automatic, and
quick process. So, the active Incubators should be imported the same way to
the new framework. MF-Warburg usually does it, and I'd love to hear his
input about this.

What to do about the inactive incubators? I'm pretty flexible about this. I
guess that after exporting the active ones, we can simply make
incubator.wikimedia.org read-only. It shouldn't be deleted because it's
good to preserve community discussions there as an archive. If anybody
wants to revive the inactive incubators, it will (probably) be possible to
import them the same way. More nuanced proposals are welcome.

As far as I can see, the most challenging parts of my proposals are:
1. Creating a stable and automatic way to bootstrap a new wiki. At the
moment this involves running a lot of scripts and making a lot of different
manual configuration changes. The current manual process is documented at
https://wikitech.wikimedia.org/wiki/Add_a_wiki . I know almost nothing
about it.
2. Making sure that monitoring the multiple wikis for vandalism and spam
works at least as well as it does for the current Incubator.

However, a comment in Phabricator by Martic Urbanec (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T165585#4221392 ) says that both things
are doable. He is often involved with creating new wikis, so we can trust
his opinion.

[Steven White]

As I wrote at the phabricator task, I agree in principle. But the devil is in the details, of course, and as one of the couple of people who are de facto running Incubator right now, I need to be involved in all of this.


One of the things that this discussion has me thinking about, though, is whether Incubator should actually be effectively closed and locked, or whether there should be three tiers: projects, incubating projects, and then Incubator. Here's why I'm thinking along these lines (even if only as a transition step):


* As of the last major evaluation of Incubator (last winter), there were 1,020 tests on Incubator with at least one valid page of content. One was the most recently exported project, which we generally keep as a duplicate on Incubator for administrative reasons. Of the other 1,019:
* 502 (49%) were either "active" (defined as one new page creation since the beginning of 2017) or "substantial" (defined as having at least 25 mainspace pages), or both. This included two that were approved but awaiting creation at the time.
* Of the remainder, only 15 had sufficient activity to meet the project approval activity requirement. Perhaps another 15 or so were pretty close.
* My estimate (purely an estimate) is that there are rarely more than 40–50 tests with substantial activity at any point in time.
* Incubator also provides a certain buffer zone around tests that are kind of borderline with respect to the current Language Proposal Policy. Many such projects are all the same very legitimate tests with communities working on them, and meet Incubator's less restrictive rules for creating tests.
* See https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Incubator:Test_wikis/open-but-rejected. Many of the projects in this category are Wikipedias in historical languages, and a handful of those are quite active.
* Looking at the above, I'm pretty sure that at least at the beginning, we should only move out the most active projects, perhaps 20 to no more than about 50. This way, we can get the bugs out without having created 500 or so incubation subdomains. Certainly during that period of time Incubator would stay open as usual for all other tests. After that, I think there are some serious things to think about:
* If a test is fairly substantial (25 pages? 100 pages?), do we create the incubation subdomain even if the test has been dormant for a while?
* Conversely, many tests open with a flurry of activity (over 1 day to 2 months), then go dormant. Going forward, do we really want to create incubation subdomains for these right away, and then have them go dark? Or do we want there to be some kind of threshold for creating incubation subdomains? And if there's some kind of threshold, then Incubator needs to remain alive for projects not yet there.


What I think makes a lot of sense is for the most active, close-to-ready tests to move into incubation subdomains, where they can start having access to Wikidata, get rid of prefixes, and so forth. I'm not sure that means there isn't a place for Incubator as a place for projects to get started in the extreme early stages.


Steven


Sent from Outlook<http://aka.ms/weboutlook>

[Amir E. Aharoni]

‬

2018-07-25 17:58 GMT+03:00 Steven White <***@hotmail.com>:

> As I wrote at the phabricator task, I agree in principle. But the devil is
> in the details, of course, and as one of the couple of people who are *de
> facto* running Incubator right now, I need to be involved in all of this.
>

Thank you very much. Getting feedback like this is my precise intention
behind starting this thread.

More replies inline.


>
> One of the things that this discussion has me thinking about, though, is
> whether Incubator should actually be effectively closed and locked, or
> whether there should be three tiers: projects, incubating projects, and
> then Incubator. Here's why I'm thinking along these lines (even if only as
> a transition step):
>
>
>
> - As of the last major evaluation of Incubator (last winter), there
> were 1,020 tests on Incubator with at least one valid page of content. One
> was the most recently exported project, which we generally keep as a
> duplicate on Incubator for administrative reasons. Of the other 1,019:
>
>
0. Woah, I didn't think it's so many.
1. Having these numbers is super-valuable, thanks.
2. How did you count? Is there a tool?


> -
> - 502 (49%) were either "active" (defined as one new page creation
> since the beginning of 2017) or "substantial" (defined as having at least
> 25 mainspace pages), or both. This included two that were approved but
> awaiting creation at the time.
>
>
1. Again, how did you count?
2. Are the terms "active" and "substantial" defined anywhere? Or did you
coin them ad hoc for this thread?
3. 500 is quite a lot. If we suddenly create wikis for all of them
according to my proposal, this will be a huge sudden addition of languages
to the interlanguage links list, at least in a few hundreds articles, and
this may be too many to add at once.
4. Do you know what is the per-project breakdown—Wikipedia, Wikivoyage,
Wikibooks, etc.?


>
> -
> - Of the remainder, only 15 had sufficient activity to meet the
> project approval activity requirement. Perhaps another 15 or so were pretty
> close.
>
>
Let's approve them[1] :)


>
> -
> - My estimate (purely an estimate) is that there are rarely more
> than 40–50 tests with substantial activity at any point in time.
>
>
Unlike 500, this sounds like a reasonable addition, although it probably
must not be done all in one day. It would still be a pretty big addition to
the interlanguage links list, to the list of languages that support
Wikidata sitelinks, etc. Spreading the incubator-project creation for a
month or two should be reasonable.


>
> - Incubator also provides a certain buffer zone around tests that are
> kind of borderline with respect to the current Language Proposal Policy.
> Many such projects are all the same very legitimate tests with communities
> working on them, and meet Incubator's less restrictive rules for
> creating tests.
> - See https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:
> Incubator:Test_wikis/open-but-rejected
> <https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Incubator:Test_wikis/open-but-rejected>.
> Many of the projects in this category are Wikipedias in historical
> languages, and a handful of those are quite active.
>
>
Hmm, that's a slightly tough one. However, I really don't want this
discussion to go in the direction of arguing about historical languages
policy. Whatever the policy is, I don't want the argument about this to
become a blocker for creating a better environment to develop wikis for
living languages, which is the intention of my proposal.


>
> - Looking at the above, I'm pretty sure that at least at the
> beginning, we should only move out the most active projects, perhaps 20 to
> no more than about 50. This way, we can get the bugs out without having
> created 500 or so incubation subdomains.
>
>
Sounds sensible, see above. I even welcome you to create semi-artificial
criteria that would put the number of the first test wikis at around 50 :)

Thinking about "getting the bugs out" is a sensible thing to consider, too.



>
> - Certainly during that period of time Incubator would stay open as
> usual for all other tests.
>
>
Yeah, that's OK.



>
> - After that, I think there are some serious things to think about:
> - If a test is fairly substantial (25 pages? 100 pages?), do we
> create the incubation subdomain even if the test has been dormant for a
> while?
>
>
I guess that I'd do one of the following:

1. Define what does "a while" mean. For example, we can decide, somewhat
arbitrarily, that a project under incubator.wikimedia.org in which there
were no edits for over a year, will be considered "dormant" and that a test
wiki won't be created for it until somebody asks.
2. Just use case by case intuition.


>
> -
> - Conversely, many tests open with a flurry of activity (over 1 day
> to 2 months), then go dormant.
>
>
So, here's my theory behind the whole proposal: In the current incubator,
people quickly create a bunch of articles on topics that interest them,
sometimes with some boilerplate (cities, countries, animals), but but then
they get tired of the prefixes, the outdated translation techniques, the
weird searching, the missing templates, etc., and give up. Perhaps with a
single wiki these difficulties will be alleviated. I know it sounds a bit
too optimistic, but at least I want to get rid of these most glaring and
arbitrary difficulties, with the hope that it will help people remain
active.


>
> -
> - Going forward, do we really want to create incubation subdomains
> for these right away, and then have them go dark? Or do we want there to be
> some kind of threshold for creating incubation subdomains? And if there's
> some kind of threshold, then Incubator needs to remain alive for projects
> not yet there.
>
>
Yes, I tend to thing that we should allow to create new subdomains for
*eligible* languages right away, so that all of them will get equal
treatment as early as possible, from the very first page.

I want editing to be easy for everyone. Including people with bad internet
connections, people who only have mobile, people who had never edited wikis
in other languages. I don't think that the current Incubator makes anything
easy for anyone, but hey, I may be missing something.


> What I think makes a lot of sense is for the most active, close-to-ready
> tests to move into incubation subdomains, where they can start having
> access to Wikidata, get rid of prefixes, and so forth. I'm not sure that
> means there isn't a place for Incubator as a place for projects to get
> started in the extreme early stages
>

I'm flexible as to what should be done with incubator.wikimedia.org when
the new system is in place. I don't mind if it remains writeable at least
for some time, even several years.

If the new system works well, I guess that it will become read-only at some
point, but I don't strongly care about when will this happen.

Again, thanks a lot for all the comments!

=====
[1] This was a semi-joke. Please don't start the seven-day countdown. But
if they are ready to approve, then perhaps we should look for experts.

[Steven White]

My comments also inline, with unnecessary portions redacted.

Steven


>> - As of the last major evaluation of Incubator (last winter), there

>> were 1,020 tests on Incubator with at least one valid page of content. One
>> was the most recently exported project, which we generally keep as a
>> duplicate on Incubator for administrative reasons. Of the other 1,019:
>>
>0. Woah, I didn't think it's so many.
>1. Having these numbers is super-valuable, thanks.
>2. How did you count? Is there a tool?
>> -
>> - 502 (49%) were either "active" (defined as one new page creation
>> since the beginning of 2017) or "substantial" (defined as having at least
>> 25 mainspace pages), or both. This included two that were approved but
>> awaiting creation at the time.
>>
>1. Again, how did you count?
>2. Are the terms "active" and "substantial" defined anywhere? Or did you
>coin them ad hoc for this thread?
>3. 500 is quite a lot. If we suddenly create wikis for all of them
>according to my proposal, this will be a huge sudden addition of languages
>to the interlanguage links list, at least in a few hundreds articles, and
>this may be too many to add at once.
>4. Do you know what is the per-project breakdown—Wikipedia, Wikivoyage,
>Wikibooks, etc.?

Breakdown is available at https://incubator.wikimedia.org/wiki/Template:Test_status_statistics#28 February 2018. (The "almosts" are usually in comments inserted within the various subtemplates of "Template:Tests" on Incubator.) I first created those terms/criteria when I did my first review in the summer of 2017, except that at the time the date for new page creation was the mid-2016. I rolled that forward in the winter review. The criteria are arbitrary, but for my purposes as admin on Incubator, what I needed was (a) a good idea of what was going on, not necessarily perfection, and (b) to make sure that I was construing tests as active or substantial whenever that was reasonable. For a purpose like this, those criteria may be too generous.

I count the tests by hand, which is very labor intensive, and means I probably get some wrong. (The advantage, I guess, is that I have found tests whose content is invalid and deleted them over the course of time.) There used to be a tool for at least part of it, but it hasn't been maintained for a long time, and I don't know how. It takes 6–8 weeks to do this, and I have a day job—which is why I only do it about twice a year.

Not all of the 500 are new languages. Some are second projects in existing languages. But there are plenty of new languages in that group, to be sure.

>Let's approve them[1] :)

I know that's a joke. FWIW, they all have other reasons not to be approvable. But I wanted to keep a closer eye on such projects.

>... I really don't want this
>discussion to go in the direction of arguing about historical languages
>policy. ...

Me, either. But for the moment Incubator needs to continue to serve those test projects.

>... I even welcome you to create semi-artificial
>criteria that would put the number of the first test wikis at around 50 :)

I can manage that.

>I guess that I'd do one of the following:
>
>1. Define what does "a while" mean. For example, we can decide, somewhat
>arbitrarily, that a project under incubator.wikimedia.org in which there
>were no edits for over a year, will be considered "dormant" and that a test
>wiki won't be created for it until somebody asks.
>2. Just use case by case intuition.

Right now I am using a blend of the above. I tend to use page creations, not edits, because from time to time you get random edits from people who sweep through and update the name of the current prime minister in the infobox, without really doing anything else, and I'm not sure those really reflect "activity". That said, I also ignore page additions by certain people I know are doing maintenance (me, Liuxinyu970226, others). I also ignore cases where the only page addition comes from the automatic creation of a redirect after a page move. Finally, for this purpose, we ignore single page creations from IPs.

>> - Conversely, many tests open with a flurry of activity (over 1 day
>> to 2 months), then go dormant.
>
>So, here's my theory behind the whole proposal: In the current incubator,
>people quickly create a bunch of articles on topics that interest them,
>sometimes with some boilerplate (cities, countries, animals), but but then
>they get tired of the prefixes, the outdated translation techniques, the
>weird searching, the missing templates, etc., and give up. Perhaps with a
>single wiki these difficulties will be alleviated. I know it sounds a bit
>too optimistic, but at least I want to get rid of these most glaring and
>arbitrary difficulties, with the hope that it will help people remain
>active.

You may be right. I just don't know. Do we have feedback saying so? Or is this just everyone's gut instinct. (Mind you, I can't possibly say I disagree.)

That said, this approach doesn't solve all the problems you describe. In particular, this won't automatically create basic templates and modules, and especially not ones customized by language. (To that end, I've started to collect a handful of really basic templates—not modules—in the fictitious Wp/qdp test, which people can subst: and then customize within their tests. But I haven't done nearly as much as I would like on that; there's too much else to do.) And at the end of the day, contributors to new tests still have to write or translate pages.

>Yes, I tend to think that we should allow to create new subdomains for
>*eligible* languages right away, so that all of them will get equal
>treatment as early as possible, from the very first page.

In order to do this, then, a few things would have to happen in fairly short order, once we're ready to approach the problem like that.


* The "Requests for new languages" system on Meta will have to have teeth, and to be the arbiter for whether a project is (a) eligible for an incubation subdomain, (b)(interim, at least) should start on Incubator, or (c) is not eligible. IF THAT IS TO BE MEANINGFUL, I NEED LANGCOM MEMBERS TO RESPOND TO MY SUBMISSIONS ON SUCH MATTERS, or to go to Meta and mark projects eligible themselves. I appreciate that people are generally allowing me to call those shots right now, but since just about anyone can start a test project on Incubator, the stakes on decisions about "eligible" aren't all that high right now. The stakes will become higher under this new regimen.
* It will also have to respond fairly quickly to new requests.
* FWIW, in clearing the backlog at RFL, we're almost to the end of requests dating to 2012 or earlier, and have addressed almost all of the 2017 and 2018 requests (except those in the last month or so).

>... I don't think that the current Incubator makes anything
>easy for anyone, but hey, I may be missing something.

It doesn't. But remember that before the current policies and practices were in place, it almost became too easy. I'm mostly with you on making things easier for people who have never done this before. But I don't want to make it so easy that we get a lot of frivolous requests, incubations and projects. And believe me, there have been a lot of them over time. (I removed three new, frivolous requests just today.)

[Amir E. Aharoni]

2018-07-25 20:04 GMT+03:00 Steven White <***@hotmail.com>:

> >... I really don't want this
> >discussion to go in the direction of arguing about historical languages
> >policy. ...
>
> Me, either. But for the moment Incubator needs to continue to serve those
> test projects.
>

No problem.


> >... I even welcome you to create semi-artificial
> >criteria that would put the number of the first test wikis at around 50 :)
>
> I can manage that.
>
> >I guess that I'd do one of the following:
> >
> >1. Define what does "a while" mean. For example, we can decide, somewhat
> >arbitrarily, that a project under incubator.wikimedia.org in which there
> >were no edits for over a year, will be considered "dormant" and that a
> test
> >wiki won't be created for it until somebody asks.
> >2. Just use case by case intuition.
>
> Right now I am using a blend of the above. I tend to use page creations,
> not edits, because from time to time you get random edits from people who
> sweep through and update the name of the current prime minister in the
> infobox, without really doing anything else, and I'm not sure those really
> reflect "activity".
>

They don't. It should all be done in Wikidata, for a lot of reasons, and
this is one of those reasons.


> That said, I also ignore page additions by certain people I know are doing
> maintenance (me, Liuxinyu970226, others). I also ignore cases where the
> only page addition comes from the automatic creation of a redirect after a
> page move. Finally, for this purpose, we ignore single page creations from
> IPs.
>
> >> - Conversely, many tests open with a flurry of activity (over 1
> day
> >> to 2 months), then go dormant.
> >
> >So, here's my theory behind the whole proposal: In the current incubator,
> >people quickly create a bunch of articles on topics that interest them,
> >sometimes with some boilerplate (cities, countries, animals), but but then
> >they get tired of the prefixes, the outdated translation techniques, the
> >weird searching, the missing templates, etc., and give up. Perhaps with a
> >single wiki these difficulties will be alleviated. I know it sounds a bit
> >too optimistic, but at least I want to get rid of these most glaring and
> >arbitrary difficulties, with the hope that it will help people remain
> >active.
>
> You may be right. I just don't know. Do we have feedback saying so? Or is
> this just everyone's gut instinct. (Mind you, I can't possibly say I
> disagree.)
>

Observing people in real life editing in Incubator, many times. In
particular, in Kabardian, Adyghe, Fon, and Dinka, with which I've had a
closer relationship.

And a few days ago there was a presentation at Wikimania that makes pretty
much the same complaints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMOS19Dj7rU&t=29m
.



>
> That said, this approach doesn't solve all the problems you describe. In
> particular, this won't automatically create basic templates and modules,
>

Yes. I'm working on that in a separate initiative. It's complicated, but
much-needed.


> And at the end of the day, contributors to new tests still have to write
> or translate pages.
>

Of course, as they do in usual wikis. It's not without issues, but at least
it will have proper search, Wikidata, and Content Translation, and no
prefixes.


>
> >Yes, I tend to think that we should allow to create new subdomains for
> >*eligible* languages right away, so that all of them will get equal
> >treatment as early as possible, from the very first page.
>
> In order to do this, then, a few things would have to happen in fairly
> short order, once we're ready to approach the problem like that.
>
>
> - The "Requests for new languages" system on Meta will have to have
> teeth, and to be the arbiter for whether a project is (a) eligible for an
> incubation subdomain, (b)(interim, at least) should start on Incubator, or
> (c) is not eligible. IF THAT IS TO BE MEANINGFUL, I NEED LANGCOM MEMBERS TO
> RESPOND TO MY SUBMISSIONS ON SUCH MATTERS, or to go to Meta and mark
> projects eligible themselves. I appreciate that people are generally
> allowing me to call those shots right now, but since just about anyone can
> start a test project on Incubator, the stakes on decisions about "eligible"
> aren't all that high right now. The stakes will become higher under this
> new regimen.
>
>
Yes, this is pretty obvious.

I do envision that the incubator wiki creation will a mostly automatic
process. There is no good reason for it to require any manual intervention
from Ops engineer, as it happens now. There should be a simple form
somewhere on one of our other wikis, probably Meta or wikitech.wikimedia.org
, where one will have to fill project family (pedia, voyage, etc.),
language code, autonym, text direction, logo file name—and push a button.
The interesting question is who should have the permission to fill this
form and push the button. My immediate thought is "language committee
members", of course, but other ideas are welcome.


>
> - FWIW, in clearing the backlog at RFL, we're almost to the end of
> requests dating to 2012 or earlier, and have addressed almost all of the
> 2017 and 2018 requests (except those in the last month or so).
>
>
Have I mentioned how much do I appreciate what you do there? It's truly
wonderful that you are taking care of this backlog.

[Arjan Verheijden]

Hi!


I have to tell that I am not very happy about this being discussed without consulting the admins of the Incubator. There has been no announcement about this discussion, nor even a simple message on admin's talk pages about this. If I weren't subscribed to the LangCom mailing list, I wouldn't even have known this discussion was taking place.


As a lot is pretty technical, I can only comment on what I think this proposal is about.


I agree that there are some major issues on the Incubator concerning edit comfort (prefixes, standard templates/modules, wikidata, etc.). If I understand correctly, the idea is to split off the most active tests into own semi-subdomains. A big problem that will have to be addressed with this is that separate domains require way more monitoring. Now, with all tests in one wiki, it is easy for the Incubator team to remove spam, vandalism, errors in pages, etc, and easy to run bots for broken redirects etc. With separate domains, that will become an impossible task, unless somekind of admin interface is created in which all tests can be monitored from one Recent Changes.


I saw in the Phabricator task: "Patroling all such domains for vandalism must be at least as easy as it is for Incubator." Is anything known about the status of this? Has a solution already been found?


Greetings,

Owtb


________________________________
Från: Langcom <langcom-***@lists.wikimedia.org> för Amir E. Aharoni <***@mail.huji.ac.il>
Skickat: den 26 juli 2018 07:42
Till: Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee
Ämne: Re: [Langcom] Please read: Fixing Incubator



2018-07-25 20:04 GMT+03:00 Steven White <***@hotmail.com<mailto:***@hotmail.com>>:
>... I really don't want this
>discussion to go in the direction of arguing about historical languages
>policy. ...

Me, either. But for the moment Incubator needs to continue to serve those test projects.

No problem.


>... I even welcome you to create semi-artificial
>criteria that would put the number of the first test wikis at around 50 :)

I can manage that.

>I guess that I'd do one of the following:
>
>1. Define what does "a while" mean. For example, we can decide, somewhat
>arbitrarily, that a project under incubator.wikimedia.org<https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fincubator.wikimedia.org&data=02%7C01%7C%7C53046b7063b34f94056408d5f2ba97a0%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636681805576428411&sdata=%2FdMScd83ta%2BNtbY0kvBqbo9dYXyip%2B5YjSbDTe2OK10%3D&reserved=0> in which there
>were no edits for over a year, will be considered "dormant" and that a test
>wiki won't be created for it until somebody asks.
>2. Just use case by case intuition.

Right now I am using a blend of the above. I tend to use page creations, not edits, because from time to time you get random edits from people who sweep through and update the name of the current prime minister in the infobox, without really doing anything else, and I'm not sure those really reflect "activity".

They don't. It should all be done in Wikidata, for a lot of reasons, and this is one of those reasons.

That said, I also ignore page additions by certain people I know are doing maintenance (me, Liuxinyu970226, others). I also ignore cases where the only page addition comes from the automatic creation of a redirect after a page move. Finally, for this purpose, we ignore single page creations from IPs.

>> - Conversely, many tests open with a flurry of activity (over 1 day
>> to 2 months), then go dormant.
>
>So, here's my theory behind the whole proposal: In the current incubator,
>people quickly create a bunch of articles on topics that interest them,
>sometimes with some boilerplate (cities, countries, animals), but but then
>they get tired of the prefixes, the outdated translation techniques, the
>weird searching, the missing templates, etc., and give up. Perhaps with a
>single wiki these difficulties will be alleviated. I know it sounds a bit
>too optimistic, but at least I want to get rid of these most glaring and
>arbitrary difficulties, with the hope that it will help people remain
>active.

You may be right. I just don't know. Do we have feedback saying so? Or is this just everyone's gut instinct. (Mind you, I can't possibly say I disagree.)

Observing people in real life editing in Incubator, many times. In particular, in Kabardian, Adyghe, Fon, and Dinka, with which I've had a closer relationship.

And a few days ago there was a presentation at Wikimania that makes pretty much the same complaints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMOS19Dj7rU&t=29m<https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DyMOS19Dj7rU%26t%3D29m&data=02%7C01%7C%7C53046b7063b34f94056408d5f2ba97a0%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636681805576428411&sdata=ACvnvmdlURKJf6FgoZ0sX5vi3yotIYJR%2BFUIWin3D1k%3D&reserved=0> .



That said, this approach doesn't solve all the problems you describe. In particular, this won't automatically create basic templates and modules,

Yes. I'm working on that in a separate initiative. It's complicated, but much-needed.

And at the end of the day, contributors to new tests still have to write or translate pages.

Of course, as they do in usual wikis. It's not without issues, but at least it will have proper search, Wikidata, and Content Translation, and no prefixes.


>Yes, I tend to think that we should allow to create new subdomains for
>*eligible* languages right away, so that all of them will get equal
>treatment as early as possible, from the very first page.

In order to do this, then, a few things would have to happen in fairly short order, once we're ready to approach the problem like that.


* The "Requests for new languages" system on Meta will have to have teeth, and to be the arbiter for whether a project is (a) eligible for an incubation subdomain, (b)(interim, at least) should start on Incubator, or (c) is not eligible. IF THAT IS TO BE MEANINGFUL, I NEED LANGCOM MEMBERS TO RESPOND TO MY SUBMISSIONS ON SUCH MATTERS, or to go to Meta and mark projects eligible themselves. I appreciate that people are generally allowing me to call those shots right now, but since just about anyone can start a test project on Incubator, the stakes on decisions about "eligible" aren't all that high right now. The stakes will become higher under this new regimen.

Yes, this is pretty obvious.

I do envision that the incubator wiki creation will a mostly automatic process. There is no good reason for it to require any manual intervention from Ops engineer, as it happens now. There should be a simple form somewhere on one of our other wikis, probably Meta or wikitech.wikimedia.org<https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwikitech.wikimedia.org&data=02%7C01%7C%7C53046b7063b34f94056408d5f2ba97a0%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636681805576428411&sdata=u8bSmyze1jQi7paddEy1SRWuMH8%2BGyLOaxIyN0Tf%2Bks%3D&reserved=0> , where one will have to fill project family (pedia, voyage, etc.), language code, autonym, text direction, logo file name—and push a button. The interesting question is who should have the permission to fill this form and push the button. My immediate thought is "language committee members", of course, but other ideas are welcome.



* FWIW, in clearing the backlog at RFL, we're almost to the end of requests dating to 2012 or earlier, and have addressed almost all of the 2017 and 2018 requests (except those in the last month or so).

Have I mentioned how much do I appreciate what you do there? It's truly wonderful that you are taking care of this backlog.

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Arjan,

Thanks for your response.

I apologize for making you unhappy. Of course, I wouldn't push this forward
without consulting with the community that maintains the current Incubator.

I'll write a more detailed response later.

בתאךיך 27 ביולי 2018 12:39,‏ "Arjan Verheijden" <***@hotmail.com>
כתב:

Hi!


I have to tell that I am not very happy about this being discussed without
consulting the admins of the Incubator. There has been no announcement
about this discussion, nor even a simple message on admin's talk pages
about this. If I weren't subscribed to the LangCom mailing list, I wouldn't
even have known this discussion was taking place.


As a lot is pretty technical, I can only comment on what I think this
proposal is about.


I agree that there are some major issues on the Incubator concerning edit
comfort (prefixes, standard templates/modules, wikidata, etc.). If I
understand correctly, the idea is to split off the most active tests into
own semi-subdomains. A big problem that will have to be addressed with this
is that separate domains require way more monitoring. Now, with all tests
in one wiki, it is easy for the Incubator team to remove spam, vandalism,
errors in pages, etc, and easy to run bots for broken redirects etc. With
separate domains, that will become an impossible task, unless somekind of
admin interface is created in which all tests can be monitored from one
Recent Changes.


I saw in the Phabricator task: "Patroling all such domains for vandalism
must be at least as easy as it is for Incubator." Is anything known about
the status of this? Has a solution already been found?


Greetings,

Owtb


------------------------------
*Från:* Langcom <langcom-***@lists.wikimedia.org> för Amir E. Aharoni <
***@mail.huji.ac.il>
*Skickat:* den 26 juli 2018 07:42
*Till:* Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee
*Ämne:* Re: [Langcom] Please read: Fixing Incubator



2018-07-25 20:04 GMT+03:00 Steven White <***@hotmail.com>:

>... I really don't want this
>discussion to go in the direction of arguing about historical languages
>policy. ...

Me, either. But for the moment Incubator needs to continue to serve those
test projects.


No problem.


>... I even welcome you to create semi-artificial
>criteria that would put the number of the first test wikis at around 50 :)

I can manage that.

>I guess that I'd do one of the following:
>
>1. Define what does "a while" mean. For example, we can decide, somewhat
>arbitrarily, that a project under incubator.wikimedia.org
<https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fincubator.wikimedia.org&data=02%7C01%7C%7C53046b7063b34f94056408d5f2ba97a0%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636681805576428411&sdata=%2FdMScd83ta%2BNtbY0kvBqbo9dYXyip%2B5YjSbDTe2OK10%3D&reserved=0>
in which there
>were no edits for over a year, will be considered "dormant" and that a test
>wiki won't be created for it until somebody asks.
>2. Just use case by case intuition.

Right now I am using a blend of the above. I tend to use page creations,
not edits, because from time to time you get random edits from people who
sweep through and update the name of the current prime minister in the
infobox, without really doing anything else, and I'm not sure those really
reflect "activity".


They don't. It should all be done in Wikidata, for a lot of reasons, and
this is one of those reasons.


That said, I also ignore page additions by certain people I know are doing
maintenance (me, Liuxinyu970226, others). I also ignore cases where the
only page addition comes from the automatic creation of a redirect after a
page move. Finally, for this purpose, we ignore single page creations from
IPs.

>> - Conversely, many tests open with a flurry of activity (over 1 day
>> to 2 months), then go dormant.
>
>So, here's my theory behind the whole proposal: In the current incubator,
>people quickly create a bunch of articles on topics that interest them,
>sometimes with some boilerplate (cities, countries, animals), but but then
>they get tired of the prefixes, the outdated translation techniques, the
>weird searching, the missing templates, etc., and give up. Perhaps with a
>single wiki these difficulties will be alleviated. I know it sounds a bit
>too optimistic, but at least I want to get rid of these most glaring and
>arbitrary difficulties, with the hope that it will help people remain
>active.

You may be right. I just don't know. Do we have feedback saying so? Or is
this just everyone's gut instinct. (Mind you, I can't possibly say I
disagree.)


Observing people in real life editing in Incubator, many times. In
particular, in Kabardian, Adyghe, Fon, and Dinka, with which I've had a
closer relationship.

And a few days ago there was a presentation at Wikimania that makes pretty
much the same complaints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=yMOS19Dj7rU&t=29m
<https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DyMOS19Dj7rU%26t%3D29m&data=02%7C01%7C%7C53046b7063b34f94056408d5f2ba97a0%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636681805576428411&sdata=ACvnvmdlURKJf6FgoZ0sX5vi3yotIYJR%2BFUIWin3D1k%3D&reserved=0>
.




That said, this approach doesn't solve all the problems you describe. In
particular, this won't automatically create basic templates and modules,


Yes. I'm working on that in a separate initiative. It's complicated, but
much-needed.


And at the end of the day, contributors to new tests still have to write or
translate pages.


Of course, as they do in usual wikis. It's not without issues, but at least
it will have proper search, Wikidata, and Content Translation, and no
prefixes.



>Yes, I tend to think that we should allow to create new subdomains for
>*eligible* languages right away, so that all of them will get equal
>treatment as early as possible, from the very first page.

In order to do this, then, a few things would have to happen in fairly
short order, once we're ready to approach the problem like that.


- The "Requests for new languages" system on Meta will have to have
teeth, and to be the arbiter for whether a project is (a) eligible for an
incubation subdomain, (b)(interim, at least) should start on Incubator, or
(c) is not eligible. IF THAT IS TO BE MEANINGFUL, I NEED LANGCOM MEMBERS TO
RESPOND TO MY SUBMISSIONS ON SUCH MATTERS, or to go to Meta and mark
projects eligible themselves. I appreciate that people are generally
allowing me to call those shots right now, but since just about anyone can
start a test project on Incubator, the stakes on decisions about "eligible"
aren't all that high right now. The stakes will become higher under this
new regimen.


Yes, this is pretty obvious.

I do envision that the incubator wiki creation will a mostly automatic
process. There is no good reason for it to require any manual intervention
from Ops engineer, as it happens now. There should be a simple form
somewhere on one of our other wikis, probably Meta or wikitech.wikimedia.org
<https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwikitech.wikimedia.org&data=02%7C01%7C%7C53046b7063b34f94056408d5f2ba97a0%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636681805576428411&sdata=u8bSmyze1jQi7paddEy1SRWuMH8%2BGyLOaxIyN0Tf%2Bks%3D&reserved=0>
, where one will have to fill project family (pedia, voyage, etc.),
language code, autonym, text direction, logo file name—and push a button.
The interesting question is who should have the permission to fill this
form and push the button. My immediate thought is "language committee
members", of course, but other ideas are welcome.



- FWIW, in clearing the backlog at RFL, we're almost to the end of
requests dating to 2012 or earlier, and have addressed almost all of the
2017 and 2018 requests (except those in the last month or so).


Have I mentioned how much do I appreciate what you do there? It's truly
wonderful that you are taking care of this backlog.

[Amir E. Aharoni]

As promised, a more detailed reply. (Sorry it took me a bit—my laptop was
crashing strangely.)

Arjan's main question was about monitoring vandalism across multiple
incubator wikis, which are suggested in the proposal. And my answer is
no—at the moment I don't have more details about it.

Obviously, this cannot be done without a clear and agreed solution to this
problem, or at least an agreement to make a temporary conditional
experiment. That's why I wrote in the Phabricator task: "Patroling all such
domains for vandalism must be at least as easy as it is for Incubator". I
don't have a complete solution to this, but it's clear that it's a
sine-qua-non condition for moving forward.

My plan was to bring this up at Incubator's own community discussion pages.

The closest thing that I have currently to a written proposal to monitor
wikis is the one by Martin Urbanec at his comment on Phabricator:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T165585#4221392

Does this sound like a beginning of something sensible and feasible? Or is
it too technical and complex and inappropriate?


--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · א־מ֮י׹ אֱל֎ישׁ֞ע אַהֲךוֹנ֎י
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2018-07-26 11:32 GMT+03:00 Arjan Verheijden <***@hotmail.com>:

> Hi!
>
>
> I have to tell that I am not very happy about this being discussed without
> consulting the admins of the Incubator. There has been no announcement
> about this discussion, nor even a simple message on admin's talk pages
> about this. If I weren't subscribed to the LangCom mailing list, I wouldn't
> even have known this discussion was taking place.
>
>
> As a lot is pretty technical, I can only comment on what I think this
> proposal is about.
>
>
> I agree that there are some major issues on the Incubator concerning edit
> comfort (prefixes, standard templates/modules, wikidata, etc.). If I
> understand correctly, the idea is to split off the most active tests into
> own semi-subdomains. A big problem that will have to be addressed with this
> is that separate domains require way more monitoring. Now, with all tests
> in one wiki, it is easy for the Incubator team to remove spam, vandalism,
> errors in pages, etc, and easy to run bots for broken redirects etc. With
> separate domains, that will become an impossible task, unless somekind of
> admin interface is created in which all tests can be monitored from one
> Recent Changes.
>
>
> I saw in the Phabricator task: "Patroling all such domains for vandalism
> must be at least as easy as it is for Incubator." Is anything known about
> the status of this? Has a solution already been found?
>
>
> Greetings,
>
> Owtb
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *Från:* Langcom <langcom-***@lists.wikimedia.org> för Amir E. Aharoni
> <***@mail.huji.ac.il>
> *Skickat:* den 26 juli 2018 07:42
> *Till:* Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee
> *Ämne:* Re: [Langcom] Please read: Fixing Incubator
>
>
>
> 2018-07-25 20:04 GMT+03:00 Steven White <***@hotmail.com>:
>
> >... I really don't want this
> >discussion to go in the direction of arguing about historical languages
> >policy. ...
>
> Me, either. But for the moment Incubator needs to continue to serve those
> test projects.
>
>
> No problem.
>
>
> >... I even welcome you to create semi-artificial
> >criteria that would put the number of the first test wikis at around 50 :)
>
> I can manage that.
>
> >I guess that I'd do one of the following:
> >
> >1. Define what does "a while" mean. For example, we can decide, somewhat
> >arbitrarily, that a project under incubator.wikimedia.org
> <https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fincubator.wikimedia.org&data=02%7C01%7C%7C53046b7063b34f94056408d5f2ba97a0%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636681805576428411&sdata=%2FdMScd83ta%2BNtbY0kvBqbo9dYXyip%2B5YjSbDTe2OK10%3D&reserved=0>
> in which there
> >were no edits for over a year, will be considered "dormant" and that a
> test
> >wiki won't be created for it until somebody asks.
> >2. Just use case by case intuition.
>
> Right now I am using a blend of the above. I tend to use page creations,
> not edits, because from time to time you get random edits from people who
> sweep through and update the name of the current prime minister in the
> infobox, without really doing anything else, and I'm not sure those really
> reflect "activity".
>
>
> They don't. It should all be done in Wikidata, for a lot of reasons, and
> this is one of those reasons.
>
>
> That said, I also ignore page additions by certain people I know are doing
> maintenance (me, Liuxinyu970226, others). I also ignore cases where the
> only page addition comes from the automatic creation of a redirect after a
> page move. Finally, for this purpose, we ignore single page creations from
> IPs.
>
> >> - Conversely, many tests open with a flurry of activity (over 1
> day
> >> to 2 months), then go dormant.
> >
> >So, here's my theory behind the whole proposal: In the current incubator,
> >people quickly create a bunch of articles on topics that interest them,
> >sometimes with some boilerplate (cities, countries, animals), but but then
> >they get tired of the prefixes, the outdated translation techniques, the
> >weird searching, the missing templates, etc., and give up. Perhaps with a
> >single wiki these difficulties will be alleviated. I know it sounds a bit
> >too optimistic, but at least I want to get rid of these most glaring and
> >arbitrary difficulties, with the hope that it will help people remain
> >active.
>
> You may be right. I just don't know. Do we have feedback saying so? Or is
> this just everyone's gut instinct. (Mind you, I can't possibly say I
> disagree.)
>
>
> Observing people in real life editing in Incubator, many times. In
> particular, in Kabardian, Adyghe, Fon, and Dinka, with which I've had a
> closer relationship.
>
> And a few days ago there was a presentation at Wikimania that makes pretty
> much the same complaints: https://www.youtube.com/watch?
> v=yMOS19Dj7rU&t=29m
> <https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DyMOS19Dj7rU%26t%3D29m&data=02%7C01%7C%7C53046b7063b34f94056408d5f2ba97a0%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636681805576428411&sdata=ACvnvmdlURKJf6FgoZ0sX5vi3yotIYJR%2BFUIWin3D1k%3D&reserved=0>
> .
>
>
>
>
> That said, this approach doesn't solve all the problems you describe. In
> particular, this won't automatically create basic templates and modules,
>
>
> Yes. I'm working on that in a separate initiative. It's complicated, but
> much-needed.
>
>
> And at the end of the day, contributors to new tests still have to write
> or translate pages.
>
>
> Of course, as they do in usual wikis. It's not without issues, but at
> least it will have proper search, Wikidata, and Content Translation, and no
> prefixes.
>
>
>
> >Yes, I tend to think that we should allow to create new subdomains for
> >*eligible* languages right away, so that all of them will get equal
> >treatment as early as possible, from the very first page.
>
> In order to do this, then, a few things would have to happen in fairly
> short order, once we're ready to approach the problem like that.
>
>
> - The "Requests for new languages" system on Meta will have to have
> teeth, and to be the arbiter for whether a project is (a) eligible for an
> incubation subdomain, (b)(interim, at least) should start on Incubator, or
> (c) is not eligible. IF THAT IS TO BE MEANINGFUL, I NEED LANGCOM MEMBERS TO
> RESPOND TO MY SUBMISSIONS ON SUCH MATTERS, or to go to Meta and mark
> projects eligible themselves. I appreciate that people are generally
> allowing me to call those shots right now, but since just about anyone can
> start a test project on Incubator, the stakes on decisions about "eligible"
> aren't all that high right now. The stakes will become higher under this
> new regimen.
>
>
> Yes, this is pretty obvious.
>
> I do envision that the incubator wiki creation will a mostly automatic
> process. There is no good reason for it to require any manual intervention
> from Ops engineer, as it happens now. There should be a simple form
> somewhere on one of our other wikis, probably Meta or
> wikitech.wikimedia.org
> <https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwikitech.wikimedia.org&data=02%7C01%7C%7C53046b7063b34f94056408d5f2ba97a0%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636681805576428411&sdata=u8bSmyze1jQi7paddEy1SRWuMH8%2BGyLOaxIyN0Tf%2Bks%3D&reserved=0>
> , where one will have to fill project family (pedia, voyage, etc.),
> language code, autonym, text direction, logo file name—and push a button.
> The interesting question is who should have the permission to fill this
> form and push the button. My immediate thought is "language committee
> members", of course, but other ideas are welcome.
>
>
>
> - FWIW, in clearing the backlog at RFL, we're almost to the end of
> requests dating to 2012 or earlier, and have addressed almost all of the
> 2017 and 2018 requests (except those in the last month or so).
>
>
> Have I mentioned how much do I appreciate what you do there? It's truly
> wonderful that you are taking care of this backlog.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Langcom mailing list
> ***@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/langcom
>
>

[Steven White]

>I do envision that the incubator wiki creation will be a mostly automatic

>process. There is no good reason for it to require any manual intervention
>from Ops engineer, as it happens now. There should be a simple form
>somewhere on one of our other wikis, probably Meta or wikitech.wikimedia.org,
>where one will have to fill project family (pedia, voyage, etc.),
>language code, autonym, text direction, logo file name—and push a button.
>The interesting question is who should have the permission to fill this
>form and push the button. My immediate thought is "language committee
>members", of course, but other ideas are welcome.

Right now, both members of the global group "New wikis importers" are also LangCom members (MF-Warburg and SPQRobin). But I think in principle anyone in that group, even if not on LangCom, could appropriately do this. (Beyond that, it might depend on just what the criteria are for someone to make a valid request for an incubation subdomain. But that's a discussion for another time.)

>Have I mentioned how much do I appreciate what you do there? It's truly
>wonderful that you are taking care of this backlog.

As they say where you come from ... áá÷ùä!

Steven
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[Steven White]

OWTB makes some good points.


* There needs to be a consultation with the Incubator admins, and then there needs to be at least one general community discussion. Concerning Incubator admins, three are here (MF-Warburg, Robin and me). Three others are at least reasonably active on Incubator (including OWTB, who is very active), another is responsive to specific requests, and two others haven't made an edit or had a logged event in over a year. Do we want that consultation to be on-wiki (public)? Or should we invite any/all of them to have temporary rights to this list, and discuss it semi-privately here first.
* I don't know if the community discussion should be on Incubator (and advertised at Meta [and Beta]), on Meta (and advertised on Incubator [and Beta]), or if there should be two. And when do we start it? Thoughts?


As far as substantive issues go, there are really two separate issues (or constituencies) that partially overlap that are being conflated here.


* I am strongly in favor of moving the strongest, most active test projects into incubation subdomains. I think that's a great idea. Giving those projects more complete functionality, especially access to WD, and getting rid of Incubator peculiarities like prefixes, is all certainly worthwhile for them. None of the downsides I'm going to point out below really apply to them. So if we can manage an admin interface that continues to let us help them manage spam, bots, etc., and if there are no more than about 20 of them, I think this would be fantastic.


The other issue (which OWTB doesn't mention) is the creation of brand new test projects. The idea is to make it easier for new test wikis, to give them all of the associated functionality that full projects have, and that without all of Incubator's peculiarities. And in principle, that's a great idea. Still, I think there are also a lot of potential problems with this.


* How do we decide what constitutes a serious enough request to press the button? For "subsequent projects in existing languages", it would be easy enough to require some activity history in the existing wiki(s). But for new languages, how do you do that? Yes, deciding the language is "eligible" is a necessary condition. But sufficient?
* Even now, there continue to be LTA's coming and creating new requests that are effectively spurious. They're valid on their face—language is eligible—but requesters don't speak the language, and no community exists. (It happens less now that I am patrolling there, but it still happens.) For now, at minimum we wait until there are people around who create some content before saying, "eligible". That at least demonstrates that a couple of people are present and actually creating content that appears to be in the right language.
* I am extremely worried that this will turn into the "bad old days", where just about anyone could create a project, and many fell into disuse (and/or were never serious). Do we want "The Wild West" again?
* Yet the idea of making things easier for outright newbies is a very worthwhile one.

I think many of these things have to be discussed, by us and by the Incubator admins, and then by the community, before pulling the trigger for anything except moving the largest, most active wikis. (Even that should also be discussed, of course, but that is likely to be more straightforward.)

In the meanwhile, I think there are three things that we can do right now to see if we can alleviate some of the current editing issues on Incubator right now:


1. Turn on the "Add Prefix" gadget by default. It doesn't make all the prefix-related problems go away, but it simplifies them quite a lot. Just about everyone except sysops (and similar people who do a lot of maintenance) ought to have this on. [I can open a discussion on Incubator about this today, and trigger it in seven days unless there are objections.]
2. Use the authority of LangCom to set a priority to get some kind of access to Wikidata turned on right away. I think a lot of what is holding that up is the challenge of multiple iw links from Incubator. So let's simply not allow/demand/require that for now. Most of the capability currently exists somewhere within the WMF world to allow Incubator's pages (a) to call information from Wikidata into things like infoboxes, and even (b) to produce an iw list to appear on our pages. Much of that capability includes the possibility of calling information from Qxxx even when the page you're editing is associated with Qyyy; all you have to do is add "|q=xxx" as a parameter. So we simply require such a parameter. Access to WD would help a lot.
3. Less important, but useful: Finish fixing some of the problems with Incubator extension (like the default info pages and especially their links to Wikipedia projects).

We can see how much some of these things help while we start practicing on the less controversial, bigger test projects. And then we can decide where to go.

Steven


Sent from Outlook<http://aka.ms/weboutlook>

[Amir E. Aharoni]

--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · א־מ֮י׹ אֱל֎ישׁ֞ע אַהֲךוֹנ֎י
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2018-07-27 18:29 GMT+03:00 Steven White <***@hotmail.com>:

> OWTB makes some good points.
>
>
>
> - There needs to be a consultation with the Incubator admins, and then
> there needs to be at least one general community discussion. Concerning
> Incubator admins, three are here (MF-Warburg, Robin and me). Three others
> are at least reasonably active on Incubator (including OWTB, who is very
> active), another is responsive to specific requests, and two others haven't
> made an edit or had a logged event in over a year. Do we want that
> consultation to be on-wiki (public)? Or should we invite any/all of them to
> have temporary rights to this list, and discuss it semi-privately here
> first.
>
>
>
As I already mentioned, there will be a consultation with the current
Incubator admins, of course.


>
> -
> - I don't know if the community discussion should be on Incubator (and
> advertised at Meta [and Beta]), on Meta (and advertised on Incubator [and
> Beta]), or if there should be two. And when do we start it? Thoughts?
>
>
Probably in the Incubator first, and then in a wider forum.


>
> As far as substantive issues go, there are really two separate issues (or
> constituencies) that partially overlap that are being conflated here.
>
>
>
> - I am strongly in favor of moving the strongest, most active
> test projects into incubation subdomains. I think that's a great idea.
> Giving those projects more complete functionality, especially access to
> WD, and getting rid of Incubator peculiarities like prefixes, is
> all certainly worthwhile for them. None of the downsides I'm going to point
> out below really apply to them. So if we can manage an admin interface that
> continues to let us help them manage spam, bots, etc., and if there are no
> more than about 20 of them, I think this would be fantastic.
>
>
Thanks!


>
> The other issue (which OWTB doesn't mention) is the creation of brand new
> test projects. The idea is to make it easier for new test wikis, to give
> them all of the associated functionality that full projects have, and that without
> all of Incubator's peculiarities.
>

Yes, this is definitely part of my proposal: not only the current active
projects, but also new ones.


> And in principle, that's a great idea. Still, I think there are also a lot
> of potential problems with this.
>
>
>
> - How do we decide what constitutes a serious enough request to press
> the button? For "subsequent projects in existing languages", it would be
> easy enough to require some activity history in the existing wiki(s). But
> for new languages, how do you do that? Yes, deciding the language is
> "eligible" is a necessary condition. But sufficient?
> - Even now, there continue to be LTA's coming and creating new
> requests that are effectively spurious. They're valid on their
> face—language is eligible—but requesters don't speak the language, and no
> community exists. (It happens less now that I am patrolling there, but it
> still happens.) For now, at minimum we wait until there are people around
> who create some content before saying, "eligible". That at least
> demonstrates that a couple of people are present and actually creating
> content that appears to be in the right language.
>
>
Known LTAs (that's "long-term abusers", right?) should be speedily ignored,
of course.

I'd even consider going as far as *speedily deleting* the proposals they
make, and not only rejecting them. If they persist in archives, they may
discourage serious people who propose the same language in the future.


>
> -
> - I am extremely worried that this will turn into the "bad old
> days", where just about anyone could create a project, and many fell into
> disuse (and/or were never serious). Do we want "The Wild West" again?
>
>
Of course not.

We'll need some reasonable proof that the person who makes the proposal
actually speaks the language or works with people who do. (There are more
and more of these projects lately, for example the Dinka one and the
Taiwanese languages, some of which appear to be close to graduating from
the Incubator.)

I'm trying to address the "falling into disuse" issue in the following part
of my proposal: "The domain must be temporary, for example for a year. It
must be easy to destroy the domain without a difficult closing process if
it proves to be inactive, spammy, or too prone to vandalism." This may be a
bit naive, however, so a more detailed proposal is welcome. (But please
read the full thing at https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T165585 first).


> In the meanwhile, I think there are three things that we can do right
> now to see if we can alleviate some of the current editing issues on
> Incubator right now:
>
>
> 1. Turn on the "Add Prefix" gadget by default. It doesn't make all the
> prefix-related problems go away, but it simplifies them quite a lot. Just
> about everyone except sysops (and similar people who do a lot of
> maintenance) ought to have this on. [I can open a discussion on Incubator
> about this today, and trigger it in seven days unless there are objections.]
>
>
I don't think that I object to this, but please be sure that it doesn't
make things more complicated for newbies of various kinds. Pretty much
everything about Incubator prefixes is awful and making them smarter *may*
make them more awful ¯\_(ツ)_/¯


>
> 1. Use the authority of LangCom to set a priority to get some kind of
> access to Wikidata turned on right away. I think a lot of what is holding
> that up is the challenge of multiple iw links from Incubator. So let's
> simply not allow/demand/require that for now. Most of the capability
> currently exists somewhere within the WMF world to allow *Incubator's *pages
> (a) to call information from Wikidata into things like infoboxes, and even
> (b) to produce an iw list to appear on our pages. Much of that capability
> includes the possibility of calling information from Qxxx even when the
> page you're editing is associated with Qyyy; all you have to do is add
> "|q=xxx" as a parameter. So we simply require such a parameter. Access to
> WD would help a lot.
>
>
Good idea. If it's technically feasible, I'm all for it. Do you want to
start a Phab task for it?


>
> 1. Less important, but useful: Finish fixing some of the problems with
> Incubator extension (like the default info pages and especially their links
> to Wikipedia projects).
>
>
Perhaps Robin can help with that?..

[Yongmin H.]

Please inform Stewards' Noticeboard (and possibly CVN people), at least. This sounds like a lot more work for us.

Just a side note: I sometimes think langcom is just creating more work for stewards and SWMT members without taking a look at the inactive projects that can be closed, but I don't have an example to show you. (So treat it as such)

--
Yongmin
Sent from my iPhone
https://reviwiki.info/
Text licensed under CC BY ND 2.0 KR
Please note that this address is list-only address and any non-mailing list mails will be treated as spam.
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2018. 7. 28. 00:29, Steven White <***@hotmail.com> 작성:

> I don't know if the community discussion should be on Incubator (and advertised at Meta [and Beta]), on Meta (and advertised on Incubator [and Beta]), or if there should be two. And when do we start it? Thoughts?

[Amir E. Aharoni]

Hi Yongmin,


בתאךיך יום ג׳, 7 באוג׳ 2018, 16:25, מאת Yongmin H. ‏<***@revi.pe.kr>:

> Please inform Stewards' Noticeboard (and possibly CVN people), at least.
> This sounds like a lot more work for us.
>

Yes, there will be more consultations. It's just the beginning.


> Just a side note: I sometimes think langcom is just creating more work for
> stewards and SWMT members without taking a look at the inactive projects
> that can be closed, but I don't have an example to show you. (So treat it
> as such)
>

Sure, I can imagine some problems with small wikis, unfortunately. They are
an opportunity for bringing more knowledge to humanity, but also a
challenge because of their special nature—few or zero writers, few readers,
and so on. I'd love to hear particular examples and suggestions for
improvement.


> --
> Yongmin
> Sent from my iPhone
> https://reviwiki.info/
> Text licensed under CC BY ND 2.0 KR
> Please note that this address is list-only address and any non-mailing
> list mails will be treated as spam.
> Please use https://encrypt.to/0x947f156f16250de39788c3c35b625da5beff197a
>
> 2018. 7. 28. 00:29, Steven White <***@hotmail.com> 작성:
>
> I don't know if the community discussion should be on Incubator (and
> advertised at Meta [and Beta]), on Meta (and advertised on Incubator [and
> Beta]), or if there should be two. And when do we start it? Thoughts?
>
> _______________________________________________
> Langcom mailing list
> ***@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/langcom
>

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
The language committee is not tasked with indicating the projects that are
dormant.

If anything it is our task to help those projects to gain new activities.
When Wikidata is used to bring information in templates and in information
in a similar way to the Cebuano Wikipedia (but more integrated in the
overall process you get the perspective as painted in the Celtic Knot
conference and the perspective that has my support.
Thanks,
GerardM

On 29 July 2018 at 11:29, Yongmin H. <***@revi.pe.kr> wrote:

> Please inform Stewards' Noticeboard (and possibly CVN people), at least.
> This sounds like a lot more work for us.
>
> Just a side note: I sometimes think langcom is just creating more work for
> stewards and SWMT members without taking a look at the inactive projects
> that can be closed, but I don't have an example to show you. (So treat it
> as such)
>
> --
> Yongmin
> Sent from my iPhone
> https://reviwiki.info/
> Text licensed under CC BY ND 2.0 KR
> Please note that this address is list-only address and any non-mailing
> list mails will be treated as spam.
> Please use https://encrypt.to/0x947f156f16250de39788c3c35b625da5beff197a
>
> 2018. 7. 28. 00:29, Steven White <***@hotmail.com> 작성:
>
> I don't know if the community discussion should be on Incubator (and
> advertised at Meta [and Beta]), on Meta (and advertised on Incubator [and
> Beta]), or if there should be two. And when do we start it? Thoughts?
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Langcom mailing list
> ***@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/langcom
>
>

[Oliver Stegen]

Dear all,

just wanted to let you know that I'll be incommunicado from next week
into October. So don't expect any responses from me. Sorry!

Cheers,
Oliver

[Gerard Meijssen]

Hoi,
I hope you are well. Take care and I hope to see you back when you can.
Thank you for all your valuable input.
Thanks,
gerard

On 8 August 2018 at 09:11, Oliver Stegen <***@sil.org> wrote:

> Dear all,
>
> just wanted to let you know that I'll be incommunicado from next week into
> October. So don't expect any responses from me. Sorry!
>
> Cheers,
> Oliver
>
>
>
> _______________________________________________
> Langcom mailing list
> ***@lists.wikimedia.org
> https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/langcom
>

[Steven White]

I responded to the security/monitoring question at phabricator. With some tweaks, it's probably a reasonable way to start. Again, though, even though I think that your biggest concern (perhaps rightly so) is the creation of brand new wikis, there seem to be a whole lot of good reasons to test this whole idea first. And the well-established, near-enough-to-approval tests, are the best ones to test on.


Steven


Sent from Outlook<http://aka.ms/weboutlook>


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Subject: Langcom Digest, Vol 58, Issue 16

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Today's Topics:

1. Re: Please read: Fixing Incubator (Amir E. Aharoni)


----------------------------------------------------------------------

Message: 1
Date: Sun, 29 Jul 2018 11:39:25 +0300
From: "Amir E. Aharoni" <***@mail.huji.ac.il>
To: Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee
<***@lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [Langcom] Please read: Fixing Incubator
Message-ID:
<CACtNa8s9UbgVja-***@mail.gmail.com>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset="utf-8"

As promised, a more detailed reply. (Sorry it took me a bit—my laptop was
crashing strangely.)

Arjan's main question was about monitoring vandalism across multiple
incubator wikis, which are suggested in the proposal. And my answer is
no—at the moment I don't have more details about it.

Obviously, this cannot be done without a clear and agreed solution to this
problem, or at least an agreement to make a temporary conditional
experiment. That's why I wrote in the Phabricator task: "Patroling all such
domains for vandalism must be at least as easy as it is for Incubator". I
don't have a complete solution to this, but it's clear that it's a
sine-qua-non condition for moving forward.

My plan was to bring this up at Incubator's own community discussion pages.

The closest thing that I have currently to a written proposal to monitor
wikis is the one by Martin Urbanec at his comment on Phabricator:
https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fphabricator.wikimedia.org%2FT165585%234221392&amp;data=02%7C01%7C%7Ca0057ca0c90d4b6bf7dd08d5f52edf71%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636684504018662744&amp;sdata=yU7bsayA%2Fnq5PG12UAO0Ex3PjgFuu7S333oaSWMEqwc%3D&amp;reserved=0

Does this sound like a beginning of something sensible and feasible? Or is
it too technical and complex and inappropriate?


--
Amir Elisha Aharoni · א־מ֮י׹ אֱל֎ישׁ֞ע אַהֲךוֹנ֎י
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‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2018-07-26 11:32 GMT+03:00 Arjan Verheijden <***@hotmail.com>:

> Hi!
>
>
> I have to tell that I am not very happy about this being discussed without
> consulting the admins of the Incubator. There has been no announcement
> about this discussion, nor even a simple message on admin's talk pages
> about this. If I weren't subscribed to the LangCom mailing list, I wouldn't
> even have known this discussion was taking place.
>
>
> As a lot is pretty technical, I can only comment on what I think this
> proposal is about.
>
>
> I agree that there are some major issues on the Incubator concerning edit
> comfort (prefixes, standard templates/modules, wikidata, etc.). If I
> understand correctly, the idea is to split off the most active tests into
> own semi-subdomains. A big problem that will have to be addressed with this
> is that separate domains require way more monitoring. Now, with all tests
> in one wiki, it is easy for the Incubator team to remove spam, vandalism,
> errors in pages, etc, and easy to run bots for broken redirects etc. With
> separate domains, that will become an impossible task, unless somekind of
> admin interface is created in which all tests can be monitored from one
> Recent Changes.
>
>
> I saw in the Phabricator task: "Patroling all such domains for vandalism
> must be at least as easy as it is for Incubator." Is anything known about
> the status of this? Has a solution already been found?
>
>
> Greetings,
>
> Owtb
>
>
> ------------------------------
> *Från:* Langcom <langcom-***@lists.wikimedia.org> för Amir E. Aharoni
> <***@mail.huji.ac.il>
> *Skickat:* den 26 juli 2018 07:42
> *Till:* Wikimedia Foundation Language Committee
> *Ämne:* Re: [Langcom] Please read: Fixing Incubator
>
>
>
> 2018-07-25 20:04 GMT+03:00 Steven White <***@hotmail.com>:
>
> >... I really don't want this
> >discussion to go in the direction of arguing about historical languages
> >policy. ...
>
> Me, either. But for the moment Incubator needs to continue to serve those
> test projects.
>
>
> No problem.
>
>
> >... I even welcome you to create semi-artificial
> >criteria that would put the number of the first test wikis at around 50 :)
>
> I can manage that.
>
> >I guess that I'd do one of the following:
> >
> >1. Define what does "a while" mean. For example, we can decide, somewhat
> >arbitrarily, that a project under incubator.wikimedia.org
> <https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fincubator.wikimedia.org&data=02%7C01%7C%7C53046b7063b34f94056408d5f2ba97a0%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636681805576428411&sdata=%2FdMScd83ta%2BNtbY0kvBqbo9dYXyip%2B5YjSbDTe2OK10%3D&reserved=0>
> in which there
> >were no edits for over a year, will be considered "dormant" and that a
> test
> >wiki won't be created for it until somebody asks.
> >2. Just use case by case intuition.
>
> Right now I am using a blend of the above. I tend to use page creations,
> not edits, because from time to time you get random edits from people who
> sweep through and update the name of the current prime minister in the
> infobox, without really doing anything else, and I'm not sure those really
> reflect "activity".
>
>
> They don't. It should all be done in Wikidata, for a lot of reasons, and
> this is one of those reasons.
>
>
> That said, I also ignore page additions by certain people I know are doing
> maintenance (me, Liuxinyu970226, others). I also ignore cases where the
> only page addition comes from the automatic creation of a redirect after a
> page move. Finally, for this purpose, we ignore single page creations from
> IPs.
>
> >> - Conversely, many tests open with a flurry of activity (over 1
> day
> >> to 2 months), then go dormant.
> >
> >So, here's my theory behind the whole proposal: In the current incubator,
> >people quickly create a bunch of articles on topics that interest them,
> >sometimes with some boilerplate (cities, countries, animals), but but then
> >they get tired of the prefixes, the outdated translation techniques, the
> >weird searching, the missing templates, etc., and give up. Perhaps with a
> >single wiki these difficulties will be alleviated. I know it sounds a bit
> >too optimistic, but at least I want to get rid of these most glaring and
> >arbitrary difficulties, with the hope that it will help people remain
> >active.
>
> You may be right. I just don't know. Do we have feedback saying so? Or is
> this just everyone's gut instinct. (Mind you, I can't possibly say I
> disagree.)
>
>
> Observing people in real life editing in Incubator, many times. In
> particular, in Kabardian, Adyghe, Fon, and Dinka, with which I've had a
> closer relationship.
>
> And a few days ago there was a presentation at Wikimania that makes pretty
> much the same complaints: https://nam04.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch&amp;data=02%7C01%7C%7Ca0057ca0c90d4b6bf7dd08d5f52edf71%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636684504018662744&amp;sdata=B9Tv3V02kDBwtkiHLTj4qphfGbqSfZDEiH%2BI3%2BLyyu0%3D&amp;reserved=0?
> v=yMOS19Dj7rU&t=29m
> <https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=https%3A%2F%2Fwww.youtube.com%2Fwatch%3Fv%3DyMOS19Dj7rU%26t%3D29m&data=02%7C01%7C%7C53046b7063b34f94056408d5f2ba97a0%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636681805576428411&sdata=ACvnvmdlURKJf6FgoZ0sX5vi3yotIYJR%2BFUIWin3D1k%3D&reserved=0>
> .
>
>
>
>
> That said, this approach doesn't solve all the problems you describe. In
> particular, this won't automatically create basic templates and modules,
>
>
> Yes. I'm working on that in a separate initiative. It's complicated, but
> much-needed.
>
>
> And at the end of the day, contributors to new tests still have to write
> or translate pages.
>
>
> Of course, as they do in usual wikis. It's not without issues, but at
> least it will have proper search, Wikidata, and Content Translation, and no
> prefixes.
>
>
>
> >Yes, I tend to think that we should allow to create new subdomains for
> >*eligible* languages right away, so that all of them will get equal
> >treatment as early as possible, from the very first page.
>
> In order to do this, then, a few things would have to happen in fairly
> short order, once we're ready to approach the problem like that.
>
>
> - The "Requests for new languages" system on Meta will have to have
> teeth, and to be the arbiter for whether a project is (a) eligible for an
> incubation subdomain, (b)(interim, at least) should start on Incubator, or
> (c) is not eligible. IF THAT IS TO BE MEANINGFUL, I NEED LANGCOM MEMBERS TO
> RESPOND TO MY SUBMISSIONS ON SUCH MATTERS, or to go to Meta and mark
> projects eligible themselves. I appreciate that people are generally
> allowing me to call those shots right now, but since just about anyone can
> start a test project on Incubator, the stakes on decisions about "eligible"
> aren't all that high right now. The stakes will become higher under this
> new regimen.
>
>
> Yes, this is pretty obvious.
>
> I do envision that the incubator wiki creation will a mostly automatic
> process. There is no good reason for it to require any manual intervention
> from Ops engineer, as it happens now. There should be a simple form
> somewhere on one of our other wikis, probably Meta or
> wikitech.wikimedia.org
> <https://nam01.safelinks.protection.outlook.com/?url=http%3A%2F%2Fwikitech.wikimedia.org&data=02%7C01%7C%7C53046b7063b34f94056408d5f2ba97a0%7C84df9e7fe9f640afb435aaaaaaaaaaaa%7C1%7C0%7C636681805576428411&sdata=u8bSmyze1jQi7paddEy1SRWuMH8%2BGyLOaxIyN0Tf%2Bks%3D&reserved=0>
> , where one will have to fill project family (pedia, voyage, etc.),
> language code, autonym, text direction, logo file name—and push a button.
> The interesting question is who should have the permission to fill this
> form and push the button. My immediate thought is "language committee
> members", of course, but other ideas are welcome.
>
>
>
> - FWIW, in clearing the backlog at RFL, we're almost to the end of
> requests dating to 2012 or earlier, and have addressed almost all of the
> 2017 and 2018 requests (except those in the last month or so).
>
>
> Have I mentioned how much do I appreciate what you do there? It's truly
> wonderful that you are taking care of this backlog.
>
>
> _______________________________________________
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>
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Subject: Digest Footer

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End of Langcom Digest, Vol 58, Issue 16
***************************************

[Steven White]

We'll miss your advice and counsel here. Good luck, and come back to us soon.


Sent from Outlook<http://aka.ms/weboutlook>

------------------------------

Message: 2
Date: Wed, 8 Aug 2018 09:11:29 +0200
From: Oliver Stegen <***@sil.org>
To: ***@lists.wikimedia.org
Subject: [Langcom] Oliver's absence
Message-ID: <d8cad506-fec6-9ae7-82e9-***@sil.org>
Content-Type: text/plain; charset=utf-8; format=flowed

Dear all,

just wanted to let you know that I'll be incommunicado from next week
into October. So don't expect any responses from me. Sorry!

Cheers,
Oliver