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.

History

 * December 2005 — ArmchairGM is founded and eventually social tools are being developed
 * December 2006 — Wikia, Inc. buys ArmchairGM for $2 million
 * 28 February 2008 — First public release of the SocialProfile MediaWiki extension
 * 21 June 2008 — Wikia opens its SVN to the general public, revealing that many SocialProfile features were taken out before the public release.
 * 1 July 2008 &mdash; Rob Lefkowitz's staff access on Wikia is revoked
 * July 2008 — slowly more features from Wikia codebase are being added into SocialProfile extension
 * 12 August 2008 — Aaron Wright (Awrigh01), the co-author of SocialProfile leaves Wikia
 * 4 September 2008 — release of SocialProfile version 1.2 with merely one big changed thing: special page aliases
 * 20 September 2008 — release of SocialProfile version 1.3 with SystemGifts and UserGifts features and E_STRICT & E_NOTICE bugfixes
 * December 8, 2008 — Halopedia is moved back to the standard Wikia codebase
 * 22 January 2009 — Siebrand adds UserWelcome into core SocialProfile because he sees SocialProfile as an extension package, like the Uniwiki extensions.
 * June 10, 2009 — UserActivity and UserSystemMessages added into SocialProfile &rarr; version 1.4
 * 20 January 2010 — 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 2010 — In a private email to Jack Phoenix, Gil Penchina admits that Wikia "dropped support" for social tools
 * February 2010 — PictureGame, QuizGame, PollNY, FanBoxes and possibly some other related extensions disabled on Halopedia per community consensus
 * December 2010 — Wikia begins to update their codebase to MediaWiki 1.16 and in the process social tools are removed from their SVN
 * Summer 2011 — Yevhenii Vlasenko (Zhenya) is working on the UserStatus feature as his Google Summer of Code 2011 project, mentored by Jack Phoenix ; Jack Phoenix updates social tools in the so-called "phase II of social tools"
 * 1 August 2011 — with the kind help of Sean Colombo from Wikia staff, the ArmchairGM codebase finally sees the light of the day
 * 6 November 2011 — Markus Glaser completes his in-depth code review of Extension:SocialProfile
 * 14 August 2012 — social tools are migrated from Subversion (SVN) to git
 * 10 July 2013 — contributed patch to work around bug #49280 committed to git
 * 22 July 2013 — PollNY fixed to be compatible with MediaWiki 1.21.1
 * 27 July 2013 — QuizGame fixed to be compatible with MediaWiki 1.21.1
 * 28 August 2013 — ArmchairGM codebase (revision 40097 from Wikia's SVN) committed to GitHub because Wikia's SVN has been shut down
 * 29 August 2013 — FanBoxes fixed to be compatible with MediaWiki 1.21.1
 * 12 September 2013 — initial working versions (version 3.0 of both extensions) of the SportsTeams and UserStatus extensions are released
 * 3 October 2014 — version 2.0 of SiteScout released
 * 5 October 2014 — Challenge, an old extension used on ArmchairGM from 2006 to early 2007 or so, released, despite not being yet feature-complete
 * 10 October 2014 — ArmchairGM codebase also duplicated to Gitorious

Other social extensions
The following list gives descriptions of social extensions not included in SocialProfile:
 * Answers – Provides a question & answer platform.
 * Automatic Board Welcome – Automatically posts a welcome message to new users' User Boards.
 * BlogPage – Adds tools for users to create and read blog posts.
 * Challenge - 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
 * Comments – Allows for a  to allow users to comment on articles.
 * FanBoxes – Adds an easier method to create userboxes.
 * LinkFilter – Allows for users to submit news links, and for privileged users to approve them.
 * MediaWikiChat – Adds a special page for users to engage in real-time chat.
 * NewSignupPage – Enhances the default signup page to require users to check that they agree to the terms of use and privacy policy.
 * NewUsersList – Displays the avatars of the newest users.
 * PictureGame – Allows users to create and play picture games.
 * PollNY – Adds various features to allow for creation and moderation of polls.
 * QuizGame – Allows users to create and take quizzes.
 * RandomFeaturedUser – Adds a tag to display a random user and some info about them.
 * RandomGameUnit – Displays a random picture game, poll, or quiz.
 * RandomUsersWithAvatars – Displays a set of random users who have uploaded an avatar.
 * Semantic Social Profile – Adds semantic tools to the SocialProfile extension.
 * SiteMetrics – Creates a special page that displays statistics regarding the usage of social tools.
 * SiteScout - Adds an automatically updating special page for monitoring recent social changes (edits, comments, votes and network updates)
 * SportsTeams – Adds networking features to a user's profile regarding sports teams.
 * UserStatus – Allows users to add status updates to their profiles.
 * UserWelcome – Adds user-specific social info where the  tag is present.
 * Video – Allows users to import videos from external services such as YouTube and Dailymotion.
 * VoteNY – Adds a  tag that allows users to vote on or rate pages.
 * WikiForum – Enables a forum on the wiki for users to post in topics and create different boards.
 * WikiTextLoggedInOut – Adds  and   tags that display different content based on a user's login state.