Topic on Project talk:New contributors/Roadmap

After a few months of Groups we have seen that making everybody go through the Wikimedia User Group process (or any process) won't work, no matter how light that process is. Still, everybody agrees that grouping the people interested around a topic is useful...

The new formulation of Groups tries to address this. Wherever there is a tag there will be a Group listing the people related to that tag. How active and structured a Group is will depend on the activity of the people around it: it can go from zero (with zero cost) to an official WUG organizing local events, with all the shades in between.

The basic functionality might be provided by the Category features, or at least they have many common similarities.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

By "tag", do you mean the same items people use on their profile to express interests?

I think it's what you mean, and it makes sense to me, but I just want to check to be sure. If so, we might just want to call them "Interests" (the term seems to encompass topical groups like "Promotion" as well as other groups like LUGs).

Yes, but not only interests. There would be also groups around locations, languages and OSS projects. I've tried to explain it better at the Groups section.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

Maybe Semantic Forms would be enough to implement Groups? Let's look at the features:

Group page creation

1. Mary is the first user that defines in her profile a "JavaScript" interest subscription.
2. A page Groups/JavaScript is created automatically, listing Mary under the interested users list.
3. Users can watch / edit / discuss in the page & related Talk page, but they can't remove or manipulate the list.

More users join / leave

1. Other users declaring their interest in "JavaScript" in their profiles will be added to the list.
2. When a user deselects "JavaScript" in their profile they are removed from the list.

Joining / leaving from the group page

1. John finds the Groups/JavaScript page and he clicks the "Join" button.
2. John is added to the list. "JavaScript" interest is selected in her profile now.
3. John realizes that he meant "Java". He clicks the "Leave" button, is removed from the list and his profile reflects the change.

Is this feasible with Semantic Forms alone?

And now as a bonus: could we add attributes to the "JavaScript" interest that would affect the presentation of the list?

1. Mary is simply interested. She wants to be seen in the list but that's it for now.
2. John has an interest in JavaScript after all, but he doesn't want to appear in the JS list. He clicks the "No list" checkbox.
3. JoSephine is so much into JS! She wants to contribute actively to the group activities. She clicks the "Contributor" checkbox.
4. The list shows first JoSephine under Members and then Mary under "Also interested". There is no public trace of John there.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.

The main part, about being able to have "Join" and "Leave" buttons in order to add or remove oneself from a list on the page, is not yet doable in Semantic Forms, though it's a feature that I've long wanted to add, and this would be a great opportunity to add it in. From a technical standpoint, it would involve adding to the #autoedit parser function the ability to add and remove elements to/from a list, instead of just overwriting that list. I think it's quite doable.

As for the "bonus" stuff: most of it is probably doable in the same way, using multiple lists on each page (members, contributors, interested users) instead of each one. It couldn't be done with checkboxes, but it could be done with additional buttons. As for the "no list" option, that could also be done with a separate list - as long as it was fine that that person showed up in the source wikitext for the page. If the goal was to allow users to join an interest in total secret, then it couldn't be done with SMW/SF.

There seems to be two points of coordination here:

1. Following and unfollowing interests (categories) from your user profile and from nodes (formerly "groups").
2. Reflecting the following status in the list of users visible in nodes.

If the list is not updated until the user reloads the page that is fine for now. If the feature is complicated altogether we can start just by allowing users to follow/unfollow from their profiles only.

Thoughts: this follow - unfollow feature is somewhat similar to watch and unwatch a page. The difference is that the list of followers/watchers is public in the page followed. The fact of updating the list remind to the behavior of categories: you add o remove a category on a page (e.g. a User page) and that page appears listed in the category page or not.

We can wait to add the concept of "members" different than followers if that complicates things. If guaranteeing privacy with "no list" is not possible (e.g. appearing in source code would be still bad) then we can skip the feature altogether. People can still watch a page anonymously using the MediaWiki watch feature.

This post was posted by Qgil-WMF, but signed as Qgil.