Topic on Talk:MediaWiki 1.19

Yair rand (talkcontribs)

(This might not be the best talk page for this. If someone knows of a more appropriate talk page, please move this post.)

A few months ago, a design idea for Reference Tooltips was posted on this wiki. Thinking that this would be useful to have on Wikipedia, I proceeded to make the JS and CSS for it, and then I proposed that it be made available as a gadget on the English Wikipedia, as I had been informed the RT was "not an official project". I intended to then propose that it be added to the ENWP Common.js (whether or not it had gained consensus for being made an opt-in gadget yet).

More recently, I was looking at the WMFLabs MW1.19 test wikis, and was surprised to see that a RT functionality (although with the tooltips in a different location, with a different design, and lacking the ability for users to click on the reference content) in use. Despite the fact that many communities might not want to have RT on their wikis, it appears that all wikis are to have this version of Reference Tooltips enabled upon upgrading to MW1.19, assuming that the Labs wikis are an accurate portrayal of what the wikis will look like after the upgrade. As far as I know, the Wikimedia communities were not consulted in this decision, nor were any of them even informed in any way of this change. I am fairly certain that this change was not announced in any Village Pump, mentioned anywhere on the entire Mediawiki wiki, or at all mentioned in any mailing list. Nor is it mentioned in the MW1.19 release notes. It appears to me that the community consensus process was bypassed, and the possibility of any previous discussion was eliminated. I am also rather annoyed that all my work toward the RT script turned out to be useless, and that this came about as a result of just not being informed about any plan for the WMF to build Reference Tooltips.

So here's some questions:

  • Did the design document Reference Tooltips become an official project afterwards and end up as the current version after some heavy modification, or was the official implementation an entirely separate project created independently?
  • Is there any intention to inform the communities of this rather major change before it gets implemented on the live wikis, or will nobody be informed until it's actually running?
  • Will there be any way at all for individual wikis to disable this feature?
  • Where, if anywhere, did discussion take place? (Is there an entire communication channel I'm unaware of?) This wasn't just a decision taken by one individual, was it?
  • How is the box containing the reference content being in the lower right and unclickable supposed to be an improvement?

(PS: Sorry for the critical tone, I'm just really annoyed right now. If I actually misunderstood the whole thing, or just somehow missed discussion/announcement of RT, sorry again.)

Badon (talkcontribs)

I confirm this. The test en.wikipedia with MediaWiki 1.19 is here:

http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Main_Page

Do you have a public wiki up somewhere that demonstrates your reference tooltips? Just judging from the screenshot, it looks superior to me, too. Once I've tested it out, I'd be willing to submit a bug report enhancement request for this issue.

Badon (talkcontribs)
Yair rand (talkcontribs)

No, I don't have a public wiki set up demonstrating it. I suppose the best way to test it would be to add importScript("User:Yair rand/ReferenceTooltips.js");importStylesheet("User:Yair rand/ReferenceTooltips.css"); to one's common.js on ENWP.

Werdna (talkcontribs)

I didn't see that you did anything. Since I'd written something similar for a different job, I spent a few minutes one afternoon a few months ago turning it into an extension that works with Cite. Eventually, TheDJ (I think) actually integrated it into Cite, so it's made it into the standard product.

MarkAHershberger (talkcontribs)

Right now (as Andrew's reply makes clear) we don't have a good way for people to know what sort of on-wiki development activities are taking place. Hopefully we'll have better ways to communicate about what we're all doing soon.

Badon (talkcontribs)

Do you know if this will be a part of the "better ways to communicate"?:

http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Project:WikiProject_Extensions

I took a look there, and it's very pretty, but I didn't immediately get a feel for anything "happening" there yet. Would Yair's work be part of the extensions project, even though it's not quite an extension? Or, is it something that needs to be handled differently?

In case anyone wants to get his work into MediaWiki via an extension, here's Extension:Cite.

MarkAHershberger (talkcontribs)

(sorry for the really late reply)

This wasn't part of the "better ways to communicate". For the 1.19 release we used blog posts, mailing list messages, m:Global message delivery, and Central Notice immediately prior to the update.

We think this worked fairly well, but one other thing we're considering are . If you have other ideas, let us know. In the meantime, how do you think these notices worked?

Yair rand (talkcontribs)

That's good to hear. :)

MarkAHershberger (talkcontribs)

Since we're looking for better ways to communicate with gadget, JS, and CSS devs who work on different WMF sites, what do you think would be a good way to attack this problem? Where could we have posted our plans so that you would have an opportunity to weigh in?

A big part of the problem seems to be that each wiki has (till RL2 anyway) its own copy of gadgets and its own developers who don't really collaborate.

We're working on addressing this, but I'm curious to hear what you think would be a good approach.

Badon (talkcontribs)

Whatever the solution ends up becoming, I'm sure it will involve centralizing communication on mediawiki.org, since this is already the place to go for everything specific to MediaWiki. Already, it seems communication specific to an upcoming version of MediaWiki is gravitating towards pages like this one.

However, MediaWiki pages are isolated from each other. The best mass-communication model I know of is forums. My favorite is SMF, with a BIG list of recent posts on its main page. It makes it very easy to get an idea of what is happening in one glance. It beats mailing lists, wikis, email, IRC, and anything else I can think of. In fact, declines in IRC usage seem to be correlated with increases in forum usage, on a global scale.

I view LiquidThreads as a step away from the proper solution. Forums as a communication model are well-proven, widely used, and easy for anyone to feel comfortable with. Wikis and mailing lists have a barrier to entry, and other quirks that do not make it easy to participate, or gain information from them. Being ephemeral is just one problem.

MediaWiki nirvana will be achieved when talk pages are linked to SMF forums. I have heard some good reasons from people who disagree with me about why we should stay pure-wiki, but despite their good reasons, I keep wishing we didn't have to reinvent the wheel when forums are already so good at facilitating communication.

MarkAHershberger (talkcontribs)

JEDL is our first attempt at this. I'm going to be finding a way to contact gadget authors and point them to this resource. Hopefully we'll begin to have a better community develop.

Yair rand (talkcontribs)

...And now it appears to have been removed from the Labs wiki. Would someone be able to explain what happened/is going to happen with this, please?

Badon (talkcontribs)
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