Talk:Gather

Add comments here!

Watchlist wishlist
As per the discussion on Wikimedia-L this week, I'd like to know if this project is going to help fix some of the longstanding requests for watchlists (see Watchlist wishlist). It seems that many of the things that are asked for over there are related to what you're doing here. Personally - I would REALLY like to be able to group my watchlist so I can collect different kinds of articles that I watch into "folders" for easier management. Equally, I would like to be able to follow someone else's watchlist folder (if they chose to make it public). This seems to be a similar functionality to what you're looking at doing here, with the difference being that I'm thinking about it from an editor's needs in mind, while this project (as currently written) seems to be focused only on readers.

On a related note, can you tell me how the Gather extension, differs from the collecting tools in the Education extension, the Book extension, and the core feature of categories? This might be useful to add to some kind of FAQ. Wittylama (talk) 18:39, 4 February 2015 (UTC)


 * Hi Wittylama. To your first point/concern, you are right.  This should do a lot of what you are looking for, but is aimed more towards readers. The current idea is that you will have a watchlist, which is private, has recent changes, email notifications and other features.  You can also have other lists, which are lists of articles with names, but do not have these editor-oriented features. To the extent that you would like more watchlists in order to bookmark articles, collect articles you have started,written, etc, this will help you.  To the extent that you want to track recent changes, it will not.  To the specific issue of multiple 'watchlists' with that specific functionality, I recommend supporting this proposed approach to this rfc.


 * To your second question, we have examined all of these and decided against building new functionality into these existing features for now. One big reason for this is that we want to experiment with different features and experiences as quickly as possible--this is facilitated by building something light-weight from scratch as opposed to modifying something that already exists and which people rely on on a daily basis.  Regarding functionality and how it differs, it is most closely aligned with user-moderated books. One reason we are not simply porting that to mobile is to escape the mental model of a "book" and the limitations that imposes on the concept of collections.  For one thing, it hinders people from creating lists like "Top 10 most influential philosophers" or "The pages I contributed to and am most proud of".  All of the other features you mention are comprehensively driven by the community.  Because each list is not exhaustive, there is a possibility of using popular lists to promote meaningful content.  It's nice to know the full list of statisticians is there, but I might want to find a subset that have been picked out by a human for one reason or another.  This is truly for different users, for a different use cases, and we are building it as an experiement, so we have different technical needs. Does that answer your questions, create new ones?  Let me know. Jkatz (WMF) (talk) 20:42, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Pau's comments
From : 21:06:31 I think Pau raised some good issues about the collections/page list feature on the mailing list today. 21:11:51 pau said, eg: "I was wondering if collections would work cross-language (that is, based on Wikidata IDs). That would allow people to consume lists in different languages regardless of the language of the creator of those lists and would simplify the life of users participating in multiple wikipedias. On the other hand it would require to deal with articles missing in the local language (e.g., fallback to another language? ask users to translate i 21:32:56 pau actually made a suggestion of that form as well: 21:33:02 Considering that articles are living entities, it would be interesting to surface some updates about the content included in a collection. This is something that already happens in the watchlist, but I was thinking about something more focused on readers where I could view that an article was added to a list on interesting architects, or some piece of information was added there.

Can we have a copy of this conversation/of Pau's email? --Nemo 11:02, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I just sent a copy over. It's essentially what cscott pasted verbatim. Jkatz (WMF) (talk) 20:53, 4 February 2015 (UTC)

Schema
In the draft schema, I only see things that an on-wiki list page can already do, except the "private" flag which you don't plan to use by default. If you don't need other data, I suggest to keep using on-wiki pages, to that you'll be compatible with Extension:Collection. If you need other stuff which can't be added there, please point it out and at any rate use another name for this thingy. --Nemo 11:10, 22 January 2015 (UTC)
 * I believe we are prototyping this on wiki pages, but in the form of a json blob. Another name has been chosen, at least for the project: Gather. We might still call the feature Collections, since 99.9% of readers are not aware of the extension named collections. Jkatz (WMF) (talk) 20:53, 4 February 2015 (UTC)