Tuesday, April 12, 2011

Bringing a #Toolserver tool to the next level II

The #SVG translate tool is developing nicely; my pet peeve has been sort of solved. It now uses the Toolserver User Screening Control which is a tool that allows for checking if a user exists on a Wiki.

At best TUSC is a crutch;
  • it seems not to be aware of SUL
  • it introduces a new user with a new password
  • it clutters your talk page with some necessary gibberish
  • the upload is done by a bot anyway
The origin of all this is that the Toolserver is not a Wikimedia project with all its save guards. Add to this that while Wikimedia has SUL, it does not provide authentication services for Wikimedia movement projects like Toolserver. When MediaWiki were to support openID, we would not need additional passwords and have implicit authentication outside of the Toolserver.

This software already exists for MediaWiki for years.


The upload functionality however does work. Now for an invitation to do more localisations; maybe the template can provide information to find more untranslated SVG graphics.
Thanks,
       GerardM

1 comment:

Jarry1250 said...

The WMF hopes to integrate Toolserver functionality into a new "Wikimedia Labs" project, which I would think would remove the need for TUSC by allowing tools to tap into SUL (I would think). It's currently scheduled for a transfer during 2012.

Also, TUSC doesn't clutter your talkpage. Well, it does, but only for five minutes and then you can remove it, if I remember the TUSC signup process :)

OpenID might still be worth it though, but that's a whole other kettle of fish.