Topic on Talk:GlobalProfile/design

I think I'm going to retool this after watching several user tests that show me that the concepts we were thinking to do regarding profile pages were not radical enough.

There is definitely potential for a major change to the way we handle userpages, and user information. Two of the ideas you might want to consider are keeping private drafts and sandboxes that only the editor can see. If the system autosaved drafts privately in userspace the way that gmail does then editors with flakey PCs or who edit from multiple locations would have a much better editing experience. I've lost several updates due to PC crashes and I can't be alone in this. Equally if people could choose to designate a sandbox in their userspace as private and only viewable by them then we wouldn't need to wonder what was in it. There are also two high priority things that members of the community have long been begging for - cross wiki watchlists and cross wiki userpages. Either of those would be a major upgrade for those wikimedians who operate across multiple projects.

I'm thinking much more along the lines of cross-wiki user pages right now, which would require technology that would enable cross-wiki watchlists in the future. More information coming soon.

Cross-wiki userpages sounds like it would be largely unhelpful across sister projects (information relevant to one project is not that likely to be relevant to another), and pretty much impossible across languages (how would translation be done?), imo.

(Also pointing out that StructuredProfile would probably need some changes to work on certain projects. On Wiktionary, for example, "Interests" and "Languages" overlap enormously.)

Leaving the question of relevance of certain data for varying project wikis aside - having structured data makes translation a manageable task. Volunteers at translatewiki.net will be translating all prompts and all selecteable answers. Rendering software will be using these translations as appropriate. That's all.

• Note that Extension:Draft and Extension:SocialProfile and Extension:ConfirmAccount respectively already do much to some of the suggested tasks.

Rehman suggested on bug 4547 (Support crosswiki template inclusion (transclusion => interwiki templates, etc.)):

(...)maybe (upon enabling cross-wiki transclusion from Commons), we could also create an option in Special:Preferences where checking it would transclude the Commons userpage to all other wikis.

For example, checking it would simply replace the userpage with a function like {{User:Rehman}} (or {{Commons:User:Rehman}}) on all other userpages...