Social tools

Social tools is a term which refers to the and various other related extensions, most of which depend on the SocialProfile extension.

Many of the social tools were developed by Aaron Wright, Ashish Datta, David Pean, Jeffrey Tierney and Robert Lefkowitz for ArmchairGM. Currently the SocialProfile extension and other related social tools are maintained by (the lead maintainer) in collaboration with a few other people,  and. is also another contributor who mainly focuses on, , and.

For a complete list of social tools, see Category:Social tools.

General disclaimer
A message from the developers:

We are are all volunteers that work on this in our own time to help make the social tools be of use for MediaWiki wiki communities. As such, none are being paid to help write code to improve the MediaWiki extensions that are encompassed under the umbrella.

While we value bug reports and feedback given to us, we are under no obligation to provide bug fixes, updates, etc.

The best way to ensure that your bug gets fixed or your feature request gets implemented is to join in for the products are free and open-source software, which means you can help! You can learn more about how to contribute by reading our process on submitting a patch below, as well as learning how to become a MediaWiki hacker.

MediaWiki version support and branches

 * MediaWiki version: Extensions under the social tools umbrella are only supported on the latest, stable version of MediaWiki core software (currently MediaWiki ). We do not provide support for any earlier releases (including LTS releases) or alpha releases of MediaWiki, and thus any task for social tools reported against these unsupported releases will be closed as invalid. Learn more about MediaWiki's development model for versioning.
 * Branches: For any social tool software you want to install, you must install from the master branch. We don't develop for any other git branch since we lack the resources for such support.

Comparison between wikis and social networks
Wikis have many pros and cons compared to social networks. While wikis are designed to help people monitor their adversaries (e.g. vandals) through the Recent Changes page, social media is designed to help people monitor their friends. Wikis generally lack befriending features that update them on what their friends are doing; it would be necessary to check the contributions of individual users one by one, except on small wikis where Recent Changes is easy to monitor.

Userboxes are a prime example of a social networking tool that wikis have but sites such as Facebook don't. Userboxes can be collaboratively customized by editing the wiki code and they can be put into categories whose hierarchy is organized collaboratively as well.

Patch process
Notice that your language isn't translated at all or that the translation is incomplete? patches are always welcome. See to learn more. Once you've finished your patch, please submit it to gerrit to have it reviewed and merged.

For other patches, add and  as reviewers for your patch. Once the patch is done, it'll usually need to be deployed to the dedicated testing environment for further testing on general user experience (e.g user interaction and UI design) and checking to see if there's anything that was missed. After the design review has been done and the patch has been amended accordingly and correctly, one of the reviewers will +2 the change to have it merged into the source code.

Testing environment
The extensions under the social tools umbrella have a dedicated testing environment which is hosted on Wikimedia Cloud VPS, which will almost always be running the most recent commit from the master branch of each social tool extensions. Documentation of the Cloud VPS instance is available on Wikitech.

Reporting bugs, feedback, and feature requests
Bugs, feedback, and feature requests should be reported on Wikimedia Phabricator, a dedicated application to ticketing and software collaboration. If you don't already have an account yet, you can read a tutorial on how to. Please note that any that are reported on the talk page of any of the social tool extensions will either:
 * Fly under the radar of the maintainers as we might likely not notice it.
 * Be closed as declined if the bug isn't reproducible or doesn't have enough information.
 * Be migrated upstream if determined that such a report is valid. It's recommended that you migrate your report upstream yourself if you know how to.

Echo notification support
Social tools are in development for supporting Echo notifications currently; see the above link for more information.

Licensing information
By default, almost every social tools extension is licensed under the GNU General Public License, version 2 (GNU GPL v2) unless otherwise specified. The only current exception is the TopLists extension.

History

 * 2005
 * December — ArmchairGM is founded and eventually social tools are being developed
 * 2006
 * December — Wikia, Inc. buys ArmchairGM for $2 million
 * 2008
 * 28 February — First public release of the SocialProfile MediaWiki extension
 * 21 June — Wikia opens its SVN to the general public, revealing that many SocialProfile features were taken out before the public release.
 * 1 July &mdash; Rob Lefkowitz's staff access on Wikia is revoked
 * July — slowly more features from Wikia codebase are being added into SocialProfile extension
 * 12 August — Aaron Wright (Awrigh01), the co-author of SocialProfile leaves Wikia
 * 4 September — release of SocialProfile version 1.2 with merely one big changed thing: special page aliases
 * 20 September — release of SocialProfile version 1.3 with SystemGifts and UserGifts features and E_STRICT & E_NOTICE bugfixes
 * 8 December — Halopedia is moved back to the standard Wikia codebase
 * 2009
 * 22 January — adds  into core SocialProfile because he sees SocialProfile as an extension package, like the Uniwiki extensions.
 * 10 June — UserActivity and UserSystemMessages added into SocialProfile &rarr; version 1.4
 * 2010
 * 20 January — Jack Phoenix contacts Jimmy Wales (who in turns contacts Gil Penchina, who contacts Jack) about open-sourcing ArmchairGM's skin; in the end, nothing becomes of it
 * 8 February — In a private email to Jack Phoenix, Gil Penchina admits that Wikia "dropped support" for social tools
 * February — PictureGame, QuizGame, PollNY, FanBoxes and possibly some other related extensions disabled on Halopedia per community consensus
 * December — Wikia begins to update their codebase to MediaWiki 1.16 and in the process social tools are removed from their SVN
 * 2011
 * Summer — is working on the UserStatus feature as his Google Summer of Code 2011 project, mentored by  ; Jack Phoenix updates social tools in the so-called "phase II of social tools"
 * 1 August — with the kind help of Sean Colombo from Wikia staff, the ArmchairGM codebase finally sees the light of the day
 * 6 November — Markus Glaser completes his in-depth code review of
 * 2012
 * 14 August — social tools are migrated from Subversion (SVN) to git
 * 2013
 * 10 July — contributed patch to work around committed to git
 * 22 July — fixed to be compatible with MediaWiki 1.21.1
 * 27 July — fixed to be compatible with MediaWiki 1.21.1
 * 28 August — ArmchairGM codebase (revision 40097 from Wikia's SVN) committed to GitHub because Wikia's SVN has been shut down
 * 29 August — fixed to be compatible with MediaWiki 1.21.1
 * 12 September — initial working versions (version 3.0 of both extensions) of the and  extensions are released
 * 2014
 * 3 October — version 2.0 of released
 * 5 October —, an old extension used on ArmchairGM from 2006 to early 2007 or so, released, despite not being yet feature-complete
 * 10 October — ArmchairGM codebase also duplicated to Gitorious
 * 2015
 * 20 January — A dedicated Phabricator project for social tools was created on this day by at #Social-Tools.
 * 29 July — Initial work on making social tools (currently just ) more responsive and mobile-friendly
 * 2016
 * January — ArmchairGM codebase also duplicated to Wikimedia Phabricator
 * 10 September – Extensions under the social tools umbrella which didn't already have officially removed their deprecated entry points (any other extensions that weren't listed had already removed their old entry point, besides Challenge and MiniInvite), which are: BlogPage, Comments, FanBoxes, LinkFilter, MediaWikiChat, PollNY, QuizGame, RandomFeaturedUser, RandomUsersWithAvatars, Video, WikiForum, and WikiTextLoggedInOut.
 * December — and version 1.10  of SocialProfile released: SocialProfile now has support for, the notifications extension
 * 2017
 * 22 January — The ImageRating extension was requested to be migrated as a gerrit repo in Special:Diff/2369518.
 * 24 January — The ImageRating extension was migrated as a gerrit repo by in Special:Diff/2371164 and officially recognized as an extension under the social tools umbrella.

List of social tool extensions by stability
The following list contains extensions under the social tools umbrella, ranked by stability.

Stable

 * – An extension to allow people to create and vote on polls.
 * – Adds tools for users to create and read blog posts.
 * – Allows for a to allow users to comment on articles.
 * - Adds a fun metric for contributors to see how much they are helping out.
 * – Adds an easier method to create userboxes.
 * – Automatically posts a welcome message to new users' User Boards if configured to do so; can also be used independently of SocialProfile or other social tools.
 * - Adds a new special page,, where privileged users can categorize and rate images.
 * – Allows for users to submit news links, and for privileged users to approve them.
 * – Adds a special page for users to engage in real-time chat.
 * – Enhances the default signup page to require users to check that they agree to the terms of use and privacy policy.
 * – Displays the avatars of the newest users.
 * – Allows users to create and play picture games.
 * – Adds various features to allow for creation and moderation of polls.
 * – Allows users to create and take quizzes.
 * – Adds a tag to display a random user and some info about them.
 * – Displays a random picture game, poll, or quiz.
 * – Displays a set of random users who have uploaded an avatar.
 * – Creates a special page that displays statistics regarding the usage of social tools.
 * – Adds user-specific social info where the tag is present.
 * – Adds a tag that allows users to vote on or rate pages.
 * – Adds  and  tags that display different content based on a user's login state.

Beta

 * – Allows users to challenge each others, and have the loser of the challenge do a specified task (i.e. "edit page X and add info about event Y") and gain points while at it
 * – Adds two new special pages, Special:InviteEmail and Special:EmailNewArticle, for sending out invitation emails to your friends. This is needed, together with the NewSignupPage extension, if you want to give out points for recruiting users to your wiki.
 * – Adds an automatically updating special page for monitoring recent social changes (edits, comments, votes and network updates)
 * – Adds networking features to a user's profile regarding sports teams.
 * – Allows users to add status updates to their profiles.
 * – Allows users to import videos from external services such as YouTube and Dailymotion.
 * – Enables a forum on the wiki for users to post in topics and create different boards.

Unstable
The following are extensions that are not under active development or maintenance currently and as such, they are broken under modern versions of the MediaWiki software.
 * – Provides a question & answer platform.
 * – Adds semantic tools to the SocialProfile extension.
 * - Provides a special page user interface for creating top lists for communities to vote on.