Social tools

Social tools is a term which refers to the SocialProfile extension 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 Jack Phoenix.

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

Rationale
Wikis have many pros and cons compared to social media. Wikis are designed to help people monitor their adversaries (e.g. vandals) through the Recent Changes page, while social media is designed to help people monitor their friends. Wikis generally lack friending 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.

Testing
The extensions under the social tools umbrella have a dedicated testing environment which is hosted on Wikimedia Labs. You can also see more information about it on Wikitech.

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 — Siebrand 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
 * 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

Other social extensions
The following list gives descriptions of social extensions not included in SocialProfile:

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
 * – The MiniInvite extension adds two new special pages, Special:InviteEmail and Special:EmailNewArticle, for sending out invitation emails to your friends.
 * – Allows users to create and play picture games.
 * – 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.
 * – Adds a tag that allows users to vote on or rate pages.
 * – 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.

Stable

 * – An extension to allow people to create and vote on polls.
 * – Automatically posts a welcome message to new users' User Boards.
 * – 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.
 * – 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.
 * – 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  and  tags that display different content based on a user's login state.

Unstable
The following are extensions that haven't been updated in a while, and most likely are broken under modern versions of the MediaWiki software.
 * – Provides a question & answer platform.
 * – Adds semantic tools to the SocialProfile extension.

Reporting software bugs
Bugs and issues can be reported on Wikimedia Phabricator (highly recommended and preferred) or on any of the talk page of the extensions, but there's a good chance they'll go unnoticed if they are posted on the talk page.

Echo notifications
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.