Submissions:2016/Developing community norms for critical bots and tools

Title

Developing community norms for critical bots and tools

(Don't let your brother-in-law's niece be the only person who keeps your community running)

Theme

Technology & Infrastructure

Academic Peer Review option

No

Type of submission

Presentation (and possible unconference follow-up meetings)

Author

Bryan Davis

E-mail address

bd808@wikimedia.org

Username

BDavis (WMF), BryanDavis

Affiliation

Wikimedia Foundation, Community Tech, Tool Labs support

Abstract

Present real life bot and tool failures with on-wiki impact that might have been avoided by following a few relatively simple guidelines for healthy FLOSS projects.

Bots and tools are a vital resource for many on-wiki content creation and curation activities. A typical bot/tool project begins life as a way for a motivated Wikimedia community member to make some on-wiki task easier (or possible). These individuals are "scratching their own itch" in the best tradition of open source development. Many of these projects have a short lifecycle due to factors such as loss of interest by the maintainer, insurmountable technical hurdles, or discovery of a better means to manage the original problem. Others however become popular and tightly integrated in the workflows of one or more on-wiki communities.

Popular tools and bots become de facto production software needed to keep the wikis healthy and happy. Their roots as weekend projects from motivated volunteers brought them their success, but ultimately pose a risk to their end users. Life happens and a single developer project is in perpetual danger of abandonment. Adopting basic FLOSS project practices and following some general rules of professional software and systems management can help protect the software and the wikis.

Length of presentation

30 min.

Special schedule requests

N/A

Preferred room size

10-20 (or more if there's interest!)

Will you attend WikiConference North America if your submission is not accepted?

Unsure

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