Jason,
I sent 2 of your questions to a developer, and will fwd his responses,
whilst he gets re-subscribed to this mailing list for proper
reply-threading, and more technical answers to your next questions. :)
(+ one more reply from me, at bottom)
On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 4:54 PM, Matthew Flaschen <mflaschen(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
1) "/Also, is there a way to query for Flow
comments with parameters
such as Flow comments by user, Flow comments by associated page, etc?/"
I'm not sure about the first part. Getting Flow comments for an
individual page is, for example:
https://www.mediawiki.org/w/api.php?action=flow&format=jsonfm&page=…
.
The roots are the topics. From the roots, you can get the revision
corresponding to each topic root, then get replies to any post.
2) and where to find technical details on the new API contentmodel
switcher, and the upcoming Special:Flowify tool.
I think in general it can be done with API:Edit, but this doesn't really
make sense for Flow. so we provide our own mechanism (currently granting
the right to create Flow boards as flow-create-board). Also, there is now
a special 'editcontentmodel' right for this.
Matt Flaschen
On Wed, Feb 4, 2015 at 2:07 PM, Jason Ji <jason.y.ji(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi Nick,
Thanks for the rapid response! I'm not sure how much I'm allowed to discuss
details about our needs (we are working on a project for a client), but my
understanding is that it involves a commenting system built on top of our
wikis which is
1) easy to use and similar to Facebook, YouTube, or other systems where you
can immediately and easily see comments at the bottom of a post or a page,
and
2) queryable, perhaps from an API or some other method, such that we could
potentially build an extension which could aggregate comments by user or
associated page (similar to Reddit, where you can see a user's comments
from their user page). In the future, we'd also like to be able to assign
high level 'topics' to wiki pages and be able to query for discussion
threads related to these topics. Our wikis are backed by Semantic
MediaWiki, so we were thinking of using semantic properties to help with
the querying aspect if we built our own commenting system, but we're also
investigating Flow to see how well it could meet these needs.
I'm not sure that the header area of the Flow board is useful to us in the
pursuit of our first use case, unfortunately. It sounds like that could be
good if we were building a new wiki in which every single page was a Flow
board, and the header area was the actual article itself. That would
simulate a comment area beneath a wiki page. Unfortunately, we already have
an existing wiki with content.
Jason
Re: aggregating: There are plans to make the Topics assignable to
categories (or perhaps a new #tag system), so that Feeds of related
discussions can be created, and sent to: e.g. WikiProject Medicine, or
various Administrator-queues, or other workflows, etc. I'm not sure if
that's on the near-future roadmap though.
Re: embedded on any existing page: In the initial
Wikitext-->(archived)-->Flow conversions (done to ~700 pages on the WMF's
internal officewiki), we copied everything above the first ==Header==, into
Flow's header-area. (This turned out to be too much, so we're going to just
look for {{templates}} on the next run.) We also have a fairly robust
LQT-->Flow conversion script, which moves the LQT edit-history into Flow.
IANADeveloper, but I imagine something similar could be done for importing
an existing wikipage (history and all) into a Flow header-area. (?) E.g.
it would end up looking like:
http://flow-tests.wmflabs.org/wiki/User_talk:Quiddity
Nick