San Francisco Hackathon January 2012/ProofRead

A small project to see if we can improve the tech support for the WikiSource community and the ProofRead extension

Team
 * RobLa-WMF (Rob Lanphier)
 * Zaran (Thibaut Horel)
 * TheDJ (Derk-Jan Hartman)

History
The WikiSource community is one of our most active non-wikipedia projects, but from a technical point of view has often been overlooked. The Extension:Proofread_Page-extension has been worked on primarily by ThomasV, but he has not really had the time to maintain it since at least 2010, let alone develop new features.

The project has a history of breaking (small or big time) on almost every MediaWiki release. Part of the reason for this is that there is not a single developer running the code on his home computer, and thus breakages on trunk go unnoticed until an actual deploy. This used be pretty bad, because until recently it wasn't possible to have the projects run on different versions of the MediaWiki code. This has changed, so in the future we are able to roll back to a working version JUST for wikisource, which should help.

User Thibaut has indicated that he wants to, at least, be familiar enough with the code to assist in preventing and solving future breakages. So we have a good overview of what to get done this weekend.

Goals

 * Get labs accounts for those interested ✅
 * Fix up Wikisource deployment wmflabs This runs trunk Mediawiki in an environment that resembles the official Wikisource. ✅
 * Setup a labs instance with proofread extension ✅
 * Setup a guideline for the community about what they can expect on future deploys and how they can stay up to date.
 * Do a small bug triage to find problem areas
 * Set some targets for future feature development

Labs

 * labs console
 * Two wikisource lab versions:
 * one on the deployment-web instance: supposed to be a realistic deployment of wikisource similar to the actual wikisource. This copy is where the community will be able to check that none of the changes in trunk break wikisource-related features.
 * one on the wikisource-dev instance: supposed to be a playground for easy patch testing and development. This will allow interested contributors to easily get started without the burden of installing mediawiki with the ProofreadPage extension locally.

Roadmap

 * Plan a Bugzilla triage session after we have the wikisource-dev wmflabs setup
 * Develop a more integrated ePub exportation of the books (See Collection extension developments as mentioned by Erik Möller )
 * Try to get a plan for a WikiSource/SisterProjects specific event ?
 * Analyze workflow of wikisource. How does it work, what can be improved and how to work on it.