MediaWiki Stakeholders' Group/Blog/2015-06-03

One of the things we're trying to do as part of the MediaWiki Stakeholder's Group is to highlight new extensions and the developers behind them. This is the first in a hopefully ongoing series of highlighting new and interesting extensions from MediaWiki.org.

HitCounters
HitCounters was written in response to the removal of hit counter functionality in MediaWiki 1.25. Mark Hershberger, developer and stakeholder member, created this new extension to re-enable the page view counter. This is handy if you relied on the hit counter functionality to say display a list of popular pages on your wiki.

You can read more about the extension on MediaWIki.org.

Screenplay
Like HitCounters, Screenplay is a pretty straightforward extension. It allows you to format text as you would traditionally see in a screenplay. Formatting for scene headings, dialog, and slugs are included in the syntax. This could be a very handy extension for folks using a wiki as a collaborative editing platform for film, TV, or theatre.

QualityAssurance
This next extension comes from the Commonwealth Educational Media Center for Asia and was created by Akash Agarwal. It's called QualityAssurance.

I'll let Akash describe his extension. "The QualityAssurance extension allows one to enable a comprehensive review for the quality of an [Open educational resource] OER (it can be present on a wiki page itself or the wiki page can be used only for QA with a link to the OER) by adding a simple tag to the page."

WatchAnalytics
James Montalvo from NASA's EVA (and member of the Stakeholder's group) created an extension called WatchAnaytics. This extension leverage the watchlist as a mechanism to understand what content within a wiki is being 'watched' and how to encourage others to watch and review neglected pages.

James and Daren Welsh gave a great presentation on WatchAnalytics at the recent hackathon in Lyon, France.

SpriteSheet
SpriteSheet is a new extension from Alexia E. Smith from Curse Inc. For those of you with an interest in video games, [https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Curse%2C_Inc. Curse] will be well known. They're one of the larger MediaWiki networks with coverage of games from Call of Duty to Minecraft to League of Legends.

This extension creates a parser function which allows you to use uploaded images for sprite sheets. A single image can contain a grid of reusable elements that can be used for iconography or other interface elements across your wiki.