Edit 2024/10 years of Toolforge: 2024/Main Page

This submission has been accepted for WikiConference North America 2024.

Toolforge is the shared hosting platform run by the Wikimedia Foundation for community and staff to operate bots and web tools that are used by contributors, readers and the general public. Some tools are very well known and receive a lot of traffic (e.g. Earwig's copyvio detector) and others are incredibly niche that only a few people even know about.

We are coming up on, give or take, the 10 year anniversary of the shutdown of its predecessor, the Toolserver, operated by Wikimedia Deutschland. As someone who has been closely involved in this project as both a volunteer and staff for all of those years, this offers us a good checkpoint to reflect on the past 10ish years of Toolforge, by celebrating successes and acknowledging missed opportunities.

We'll examine Toolforge from three different lenses:

• Platform: how Toolforge provides a service for the benefit of other Wikimedia projects
• Governance: tool hosting transitioned from WMDE to WMF, and then efforts to give the community more power
• Project: Toolforge is (maybe) a Wikimedia sibling project in its own right, how does it contribute to spreading free knowledge?

This talk focuses on a technical platform and will discuss technical matters, but will ensure it's reasonably accessible to a non-technical audience.