The Whelming

As you may know, I have a lot of tools for Wikipedia, Wikidata, Commons, etc. A lot of tools means a lot of code, and that means a lot of bugs, things that could work better, feature requests, and so on.

How do I learn about such issues as people encounter them? In a variety of ways. Most of my tools have git repositories, usually on GitHub and BitBucket, where issues and feature requests can be posted. But many people just leave comments on one of my many talk pages (de, en, commons, wikidata, meta, …), on the talk page of a tool (usually for the documentation page), and sometimes I get messages via email, Twitter, Telegram (the app), Signal, etc.

There is just no way for me to keep track of all of these. Some of the talk pages I visit rarely (eg meta), messages on Twitter are forgotten once they scroll out of sight, and so on. I needed a way to aggregate all those bug reports in one place.

Enter The Buggregator .

I started by creating a database of my tools. Yes, all of them. Including the JavaScript ones on the wikis. Including the old, obsolete and unmaintained ones. The sub-tools on my Toolforge amalgamate tools like “wikidata-todo”. Everything.

Then, I wrote import scripts. One for github, one for bitbucket, one for talk pages. (Tweets can be added manually at the moment). These run once a day, for everything I can think of. A heuristic tries to assign tools to (for example) new talk page topics.

I started out with 1795 issues, many of them “historical”, and am now down to 1516. Some way to go, but that has never discouraged me before.

I did this a few months ago and forgot to write about it, as I was busy with some personal issues (not tracked in Buggregator!). The reason I remembered is that Toolhub is now in production, and I think it’s great. But while it is using entries from Hay’s Directory (HD), it does not have all the tools I have in Buggregator.

So I made a script that uses the Buggregator tool list, checks it against the Toolhub list, and (once a day) creates a HD-style tool list, which I just added to the HD sources. That should add the tools to HD, which in turn should add them to Toolhub. There are ~200 of my tools not in HD and (probably) not in Toolhub, though this might create some duplication. But better to have a tool listed twice (until that can be cleaned up) than not having it listed at all, IMHO.

If you find tools of mine I forgot (entirely possible), or see some ways to get that count of open issues down, please let me know!

This was written by Magnus. Posted on Thursday, October 21, 2021, at 12:22. Filed under Wikimedia. Bookmark the permalink. Follow comments here with the RSS feed. Both comments and trackbacks are currently closed.

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