First-ever Coolest Tool Award: Thank you for the tools!

By Birgit Müller, Director of Technical Engagement, The Wikimedia Foundation

Wiki communities around the globe have diverse use cases and technical needs. Technical contributors help finding and addressing those use cases every day: People experiment with new ideas, build local and global solutions and bridge workflow gaps in our software. Tools help address specific use cases of language and project communities, make content gaps visible, support data import, make it easier to maintain and curate content, and much more.

The Coolest Tool Award aims to acknowledge that, and make volunteer developers’ work more visible. For the first time, at Wikimania in Stockholm, 10 of the greatest tools have been recognized in a variety of categories: Experience, Tiny, Impact, Reusable, Editor, Developer, Mobile, Newcomer, Outreach, Eggbeater (= tools in use for more than 10 years). The awarded projects are based on nominations by the community, and reviewed and selected by the 2019 Coolest Tool Academy.

Open Source isn’t just about open code repositories and free licenses: it is about promoting and living a collaborative culture, and the contributions of many. The Coolest Tool Award acknowledges projects and with that, all the people who have been contributing to those projects — primarily the developers and maintainers, and the people who help with documentation, translation, feedback, technical advice, design or communication.

Thank you for all your work!

2019 winner projects

Experience — Intuitive and easy to use

Locator tool helps geocoding existing images, i.e., to addcamera orobject location information to images on Wikimedia Commons. As of August 2019, more than 120000 locations have been added to Wikimedia Commons via Locator-tool.

Tiny — Small tools and tools that do one thing well

HotCat adds links to the category bar to easily remove, change, or add categories. It can be activated via user preferences on many wikis.

Impact — Tools that have broad or deep impact

InternetArchiveBot finds dead links in references in Wikimedia projects and adds a link to an archived version on the InternetArchive.

Reusable — Serves many wikis and projects

Pageviews Analysis provides statistics about page views across languages, projects and platforms.

Editor — Tools that augment editing

QuickStatements is a powerful editor for Wikidata. Statements, labels, descriptions and aliases can be added and removed by using simple text commands. More than 90 million edits on Wikidata have been made via QuickStatements.

Developer — Tools that primarily serve developers

MediaWiki code search allows to search through source-code of Wikimedia-related software hosted in Gerrit.

Mobile — Mobile apps and mobile-focused tools

Commons Mobile app allows to upload photos to Wikimedia Commons directly from your smartphone.

Newcomer — New tools or tools by new developers

NOA upload tool allows fetching scientific images from open access articles and uploading the ones suitable for re-use to Wikimedia Commons.

Outreach — Tools that help grow the movement

Programs and Events Dashboard helps to measure the impact of programs — for example to gain new editors — and is used by program and event organisers.

Eggbeater — Tools in use for more than 10 years

Twinkle helps editors with Wikipedia maintenance tasks and helps to deal with acts of vandalism or unconstructive edits.

Congratulations to all winner projects! ❤

Also, a huge thanks to all the people who took the time to nominate their favorite tools and to the people who shared ideas to improve future Coolest Tool Awards. Thanks also to everyone who spread the word about the Coolest Tool Award! This is much appreciated 🙂

For more details on the awarded projects, please see the slide deck used in the award ceremony.

2019 was the kick off year for the Coolest Tool Award!e hope to acknowledge and celebrate many more tools in the years to come 🙂

~ Birgit — for the 2019 Coolest Tool Academy

About this post

This post originally appeared in Down the Rabbit Hole on 4 October 2019.

Featured image credit: Coolest tool award (Wikimania 2019), Martin Kraft, Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International