Mailing List Archive

I just want to thank the WMDE team, as well as the WMF service ops team for
putting so much work into Kartographer and Kartotherian over the last two
years.
A great deal of effort was put into solving many, many small problems and
several major ones and building a whole new feature. The code is now better
understood, more readable and easier to maintain, the service more
predictable and reliable.

At the same time, this is a great example of how much mess builds up when
we halt product development and don't maintain it for a couple of years and
how long it takes to clean that up, without even getting around to most of
the feature requests that editors have asked for. Heck, in the process,
about as many if not more new tickets were added as there have been solved
and removed from the backlog. There is still years worth of potential
development here.

While Maps in particular is vulnerable to this, as it deals with so much
data, features and also technologies which we don't use a lot within the
MediaWiki/Wikimedia eco sphere, this is only a magnifying glass for much of
the multimedia content within the projects.

I hope the foundation has been paying a lot of attention to this project,
as there are lots of lessons all around. From how we got there, to how
difficult a seemingly 'small' problem can be (data sync issues with OSM),
to what the community is asking for (attention to bugs that get in the way
of usage of functionality), to cleanup efforts required before feature
development can even start in cases like this, as well as how to research
and listen to communities.

Big hug for all those who worked on it and obviously cared about making it
work. Y'all get a barnstar !

DJ


On Wed, Apr 19, 2023 at 1:22?PM Johanna Strodt <johanna.strodt@wikimedia.de>
wrote:

> *Sorry for cross-posting*
>
>
> Hello, this is Wikimedia Deutschland’s Technical Wishes team with news on
> Kartographer:
>
> As was requested by many community members, it is now possible to see
> nearby articles on a Kartographer map. This offers an additional way of
> exploring content on the wikis. The feature was deployed to most
> Wikimedia wikis <https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T334079> on April 11.
> To try it out, open any Kartographer map into full screen mode and click on
> “Show nearby articles” in the footer.
>
> Some links if you would like to learn more:
>
> -
>
> The help page on mediawiki.org with a short overview of this feature:
> https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Help:Extension:Kartographer#Show_nearby_articles
>
> -
>
> Our project page with more detailed information:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Geoinformation/Nearby_articles
>
>
> German, Catalan, Russian and Hebrew Wikipedia, and English and German
> Wikivoyage have already been using this feature since October, and have
> given plenty of feedback – thanks a lot! If you have any feedback, please
> let us know on this talk page:
> https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Talk:WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Geoinformation/Nearby_articles
>
> With this deployment, our focus area “Better support for geo information
> <https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/WMDE_Technical_Wishes/Geoinformation>”
> is coming to an end. On behalf of the whole Technical Wishes team, many
> many thanks to everyone who tested, gave feedback, was interviewed,
> reviewed tickets, or contributed in any other way. It is deeply appreciated!
>
> Johanna
>
> for the Technical Wishes team at Wikimedia Deutschland
> --
> Johanna Strodt Project Manager Community Communications for the Technical
> Wishes project
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