Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Software/Free and open-source software task force

Regarding categorization by importance

Hi everybody, I love the commotion here :D

I firmly believe that in order to make our work and time spent here most impactful, we need to be able todetermine which are the most vital articles. This is where our importance/quality table comes into place. This is IMHO correct and widely used approach, but we miss a cohesive way to grade articles. Our mother-WikiProject, Software, provides a nice writeup, but the importance part I believe to be inadequate, as FOSS is not only software but also a social movement with history, ideas, etc. so more of a social science.

So, in order for us to be on same page while making assessments – based on this, and other importance scales I've found on WP – I propose our own scale, and ask for discussion: User:K4rolB/sandbox2 – K4rolB (talk) 19:26, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

I support the suggested scale. - Daveout(talk) 20:11, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Thank you K4rolB for your initiative. I like the way you are thinking. I disagree on some points though:

Agree that we need rules for categorization

Someone have to do the sorting work. So who ever wants to do this task need to know what is census here. Currently we don't seem to have this.

B existing assessment page

It seems we inherited a task which was started 15(!) years ago. After we have a basic conensus in which direction the assessment should heading towards we should start writing down the rules there

Agree that FOSS is not just about software

I consider as absolutely essential to cover topics like Free_Software_Foundation and Richard_Stallman. This means we should not just cover technical aspects and software articles but should support the ideas behind FOSS/FLOSS while fully maintain WP:NPOV

 Disagree User:K4rolB/sandbox2 example in regard to the importance assessment

I consider it a safe (and proven) but uninspired path.

What I personally believe is that as WT:FOSS we should try to not doing the same work as our mother WikiProject. For example articles as Python, Ubuntu or Firefox will be covered by them anyway and already got widespread attention. I don't see a requirement for a WT:FOSS to basically do the same work.

Suggestion Using an alternative system based on interest and effect for the FOSS community

What I would propose is making current important projects and alternatives to proprietary software more visible. I consider User:Greatder list of drafts here at this discussion page as a good example of what we should focus on because probably noone else would bother with.

I am aware that might fail in some cases due to WP:N and that is okay. We don't have to include every newly created repository. But something like SponsorBlock could benefit greatly.

If support newer projects (e.g. Garuda_Linux) instead of dinosaurs (e.g. SUSE_Linux) we will more likely work on what people need to make an informed decision and thus having a higher chance that someone who is interested in FOSS to join us. I assume more people joined WT:FOSS to have a better coverage of an open source program or a new linux distribution than improving the Python, Ubuntu or Firefox articles. That is the main reason why I disagree with the current User:K4rolB/sandbox2 example since it would incentivize to over-engineer the dinosaur articles while disincentive to give the new articles a solid foundation.

I also would emphasise more on lists as List_of_password_managers and comparisons as Comparison of source-code-hosting facilities to include and highlight FOSS.

If people like this approach I would put the work into a protoype of an assesment page. GavriilaDmitriev (talk) 21:50, 23 February 2022 (UTC)

Hi @GavriilaDmitriev,

With your post you gave me quite a puzzle and also an important insight into a different point of view, which I am really thankful for. We are not that far away in out thinking as it might seem. I think you see importance as priority itself. I thought of priority as a highest dissonanse between importance and quality.

Let me then defend my system (not that it is perfect).

Interest and effect for the FOSS community are in fact a part of my proposed grading scheme, like: "Known to many people interested in FOSS

". Although the wording might be different.

My mistake was that I was trying to use well-developed articles as examples for importance scale and you may have mistook it as my push to focus on those. Nothing could be further from truth! 20/80 rule says that it easier to get something from zero to valuable, rather than from there to perfect. So I agree that those articles should not be our top priority, because they are already in a great shape. I want other important articles to join them. (As a little friendly nudge to other users, we could swap those examples regularly for important articles that actually do need work, how about that?)

Yet you see, interest and effect for the FOSS community are tricky things to measure. If you take a look at page information for sponsorblock, Garuda and Ubuntu, you can see that Ubuntu had x9 times more views last month than both those combined. So maybe it is interesting and having a good article is impactfull.

But there is a catch – Ubuntu is already a B-class article. Which is really good. Next one please!

If I were to follow the scale as it is in my sandbox, I would probably grade sponsorblock and Garuda as Mid. Which does not look like much, but already puts it in the top 15% of articles (by actual state of our quality/importance table, excluding GA and B articles; and also assuming that those ratings are not overblown right now). Which is quite high IMHO.

Also, the quality scale does not exclude having some community events for improving some special cases, like the one you proposed earlier! (which I will answer to in some time but my life is hectic right now). K4rolB (talk) 20:53, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

I think this assessment is best for the software article project instead of this subproject since most of the things that I see, find, read and edit will squarely land in low importance. I think GavriilaDmitriev has a point (I would like to see the prototype first though), but the biggest problem with this project is finding sources. Greatder (talk) 08:43, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

 New proposal

Here is my current suggestion to implement a new assessment system: User:GavriilaDmitriev/FOSS_assessment 
Improvements and criticism on the proposal itself please here  
GavriilaDmitriev (talk • they/them) 16:13, 24 February 2022 (UTC)

Exercise of common understanding of article assessment by Importance

While having the discussion about having a common understanding of what importance means for us as WP:FOSS I would suggest this example exercise:

Here we see our table of article assessments.

Right now I just want to talk about the List category. We have these tagged entries there:

FOSS articles by importance

Quality	Top	High	Medium	Low	???	Total
List	0	7	20	14	13	54

Everyone can click on the number of these entries and see a listing of listings like here and think how much they agree with the current sorting and how they would make it different. I have chosen Lists due to their low sample size. After doing that, I recommend to read these examples and suggestions on how those lists should be assessed:

• Generic template scheme
• Another generic template scheme
• Our mother WP:SOFTWARE template
• K4rolB suggestion for us
• GavriilaDmitriev suggestion for us

After doing that I think everyone should be better able to contribute to a discussion about this matter GavriilaDmitriev (talk • they/them) 12:51, 25 February 2022 (UTC)

I do a lot of assessments for several projects. I think it is helpful to have similar importance assessment criteria across projects because many editors are members of multiple projects or at least work on articles belonging to multiple projects. Your new proposed criteria deviates from the criteria used in other projects in that it focuses more on what you believe is or should be important to editors whereas established criteria focuses on what is expected to be important to readers. One of our operating principles for Wikipedia collaboration is that the work we do is in service of readers not for ourselves or other editors. This proposed new criteria doesn't mesh well with this principle. I don't see a problem using the same criteria used by WP:SOFTWARE for this subproject. ~Kvng (talk) 14:39, 1 March 2022 (UTC)

Thanks for your great feedback @Kvng. May I ask for example/cases in which our assessment would differ from WP:SOFTWARE? I assume there wouldn't be much deviation since we are a subset of WP:SOFTWARE and according to the generally accepted and practiced importance assessment scheme there is not much wiggle room to come to different conculusions. If Software is not FOSS then it won't be part of our collection. If it is then it either has the same importance to us (unknown software remains unknown even it is FOSS) or we just bump every importance just by one level compared to what WP:SOFTWARE would do. Either way there is no manual assessment needed. I would love to hear your view on that. And thank you again for your comment.

GavriilaDmitriev (talk • they/them) 18:55, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

I don't see a reason why FOSS assessments should differ from WP:SOFTWARE assessments so I won't be able to provide any examples where I think they should differ. Your proposed criteria does include some examples and that's not how I'd rate those under WP:SOFTWARE guidelines. Established and familiar topics such as Ubuntu and Copyleft would get higher than a Low rating and emerging topics such as Nitter, Freetube, Pixelfed, Invidious would not be assigned a High rating until we've had more time to evaluate their longer-term importance. ~Kvng (talk) 20:37, 4 March 2022 (UTC)

Kvng Thanks for your comment and arguement. I agree with your proposal since it really is hard to find source for some of these drafts I created. But I think this task force should have a focus on articles that the parent project focuses less since we are a taskforce on Foss. I will have the software importance list for importance but also have a rising articles task list. Greatder (talk) 16:42, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

Sounds like what you want is to create an initiative here to improve articles that the project thinks need attention. That can be done separate of importance ratings. See WP:AFI for an example. ~Kvng (talk) 17:43, 5 March 2022 (UTC)

@Kvng: Can you make a AfC page here? I have quite a lot of Draft that I think will be improved from attention here.(See my Tasks subpage#Drafts) Greatder (talk) 07:58, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

I'm not sure what you're asking for. Can you make Tasks subpage#Drafts a hyperlink to help clarify? ~Kvng (talk) 13:26, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

@Kvng Link https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Greatder/Tasks#Drafts sorry for being unclear. Mobile editing is horrendous. Greatder (talk) 13:58, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

New IRC Channel for WP:FOSS

Community building is hard. There are a lot of people who care and engage in FOSS topics but there is no way to interact with each other besides of posting on each other talk pages which is rather unpersonal.

To enable us to talk to each other and discuss the direction of WP:FOSS we can use IRC as chat platform.

Click here for the official manual for using IRC for Wikipedia

Here in short where to find us:

Server host	irc.libera.chat
Port	6697
channel	#wikipedia-en-software
quick access	https://web.libera.chat/?#wikipedia-en-software

We are sharing the same IRC with our mother group since IRC is pretty inactive anyway.

Feel free to join! GavriilaDmitriev (talk • they/them) 09:16, 27 March 2022 (UTC)

The problem with IRC is there's no async communication. If someone answers or talks while I am offline, I can't access those talks. Unless you have archives, do you? Greatder (talk) 08:00, 19 August 2022 (UTC)

@Greatder: You can use Matrix to stay online on IRC. See meta:Matrix.org § Using Element as an IRC client for the man page. But if you've been idle for one month, they will kick you from the server. That's enough for you, maybe? — Labdajiwa (talk) 00:30, 30 August 2022 (UTC)

Help from "new page reviwer" needed

Someone sympathetic or familiar with the creation of FOSS articles. Please respond ASAP. Thanks –Daveout(talk) 21:47, 25 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi! What is it refering to? — K4rolB (talk) 18:00, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Hi, @K4rolB:. I'm working on a new article and I received a harsh response from a Page Reviewer. And I responded. (and by the way I copied some things from Vanced but I fully attributed as we are required.) I know the sourcing in my article isn't perfect, just like we see in so many small FOSS apps (like NewPipe, So I thought a Page Reviewer sympathetic to FOSS would be more understanding. Just recently, I was trying to save a FOSS game emulator from deletion that was facing similar issues. –Daveout(talk) 18:50, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

nah nevermind, maybe it isn't so urgent afterall. –Daveout(talk) 21:20, 26 September 2022 (UTC)

Sorry I didn't respond on time – it is now a limited resource for me :D

Still, I've taken a look and the discussion looks very reasonable to me. Quality requirements for articles get higher over time on WP, that's why you can see some really bad articles published, while yours – even if objectively better – is being moved to draft.

I believe that you squeezed out every bit of notability from the Internet sources and IMHO it is just so barely enough to keep the article. Good job on your internet-scouring skills!

If I can have some suggestions about the article content itself:

• Functionalities section has no sources. Try to move some from lead section. We should minimize the references in lede, as it is supposed to simply summarize the rest of the article - it follows that one do not put in a summary anything that is not confirmed by the rest of the article.
• the list of capabilities in lead section is too big and the text does not flow naturally. The exhaustive list of notable features should be kept in Functionalities section
• When it comes to sources, I would stick to the reliable ones. Especially the reddit bugs me. We tend to use WP as a comprehensive database of all information, but if the broad world does not give us a good reference to some info, then maybe it is objectively not interesting (looking now at all those release history tables..).

Other than that, I agree with the conclusion, that we need to wait until the application gets more recognition to write something more about it. — K4rolB (talk) 12:50, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

You're absolutely correct. Thanks for the assessment and the tips. I agree that I should wait some more (the software is still in alpha stage). I think I just freaked out and overreacted when I saw it being drafted. 😅. But everything will be fine. –Daveout(talk) 16:54, 27 September 2022 (UTC)

WP:RSN Discussion of a source related to FOSS topics

is here FYI. -- Yae4 (talk) 18:50, 13 June 2023 (UTC)

Requesting review of my edits

[[Talk:Open-source software]]

Hi, I'm a paid student editor and I have recently made some changes to the open source software Wikipedia page. I would appreciate it if someone could look them over and give their thoughts. Thanks!

Policy1257 (talk) 16:01, 25 January 2024 (UTC)