User talk:Novem Linguae/Essays/Rewriting PageTriage is a bad idea

Do whatever brings you joy
Here's what I wrote in a private email about this subject. In short, volunteers have the flexibility to do whatever they want, so if they find a rewrite fun, they should do it. If it's not fun, then don't do it.

If WMF staff take [PageTriage] on, then I think it's probably correct to just fix up the existing codebase for the reasons you mention.

But if a group of volunteers take it on (even if grant supported), they should do whatever they enjoy. If it's not fun, there's very little motivation to work on things. Porting legacy code can be very boring, while rewriting it from scratch using the shiny new thing can be very fun and attractive!

I think the best answer is probably somewhere in the middle, rewrite some components (the underscore stuff) while keeping others (some of the PHP backend stuff).

One of the things I learned from Tim Starling is to imagine what PageTriage would look like if it were designed and invented today. What would you do differently? Then figure out how to go from where we are today to your ideal state, compromising where necessary.

I tend to write notes on the "what if it was built today" using very lightweight user subpages, e.g.:


 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Legoktm/pings
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Legoktm/namespaces
 * https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Legoktm/0

and then once I know where I want to go, I turn it into Phabricator tasks. Legoktm (talk) 22:03, 19 October 2022 (UTC)

Hmmm
Not being a developer or one who does much coding, I couldn't assess the quality of your argument. But it was interesting to read your point of view on the subject. I appreciate you writing it up. Liz Read! Talk! 05:39, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

Incremental refactor
My thinking is: incremental refactor for backend classes to make them easier to reason about, test, and extend, and then think about what we want to do with the front-end. Given that the libraries used there aren't used anywhere else in the MediaWiki landscape, I'm more included for Codex rewrite, which would be basically starting from scratch. KHarlan (WMF) (talk) 11:54, 2 December 2022 (UTC)


 * Thanks @KHarlan (WMF). I responded in the two tickets. I may revisit my strong "don't rewrite PageTriage" opinion as we flesh out the details here. I trust your experience. – Novem Linguae (talk) 20:05, 2 December 2022 (UTC)