On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 7:29 PM, Vivian Landers <vivianlanders(a)gmail.com> wrote:
Hi all, I'm new to this list, but I'm sure
this topic has come up many times
before. In short, wiki syntax is inadequate for structuring discussion
pages, and Mediawiki needs a forum system. LiquidThreads is the most
significant effort in this direction, and it's a big step forward, but the
project is apparently dead and it's not being adopted by WMF.
It's not dead, so the answer is probably just to be more aggressive
about getting it adopted by the WMF. I suspect it will have serious
performance issues that will need to be worked out before it's usable
by Wikipedia.
There's still significant disagreement about a few
specific issues like
whether users, just admins, or no one should be permitted to edit comments
of others, or move threads from one discussion page to another
As far as I'm concerned, there is not any disagreement that's
significant, at least with respect to Wikimedia. We're talking about
a *wiki* discussion system. Allow open editing and preserve
histories, it's as simple as that. If someone wants to add options
that non-Wikimedia administrators can configure if it's useful to
them, I don't necessarily have any problem with that.
There's a significant migration problem: what to
do with the massive reams
of content existing on discussion pages and in discussion archives?
Not a big issue. Any discussion page will need to have some section
that's editable like a usual wiki page, probably, to store
non-discussion content: header templates, for instance. So just dump
the old discussions in there.
There
may also be scalability issues with creating a system that can handle the
kind of load Wikipedia currently sees.
That's one of the more serious issues. I recall David was having
issues in deciding on the schema, since he wanted efficient versioned
trees. I don't know what he ended up settling on, but I would imagine
it would have some issues when scaling up to the massive levels needed
by Wikipedia. Few schemas don't. There are lots of fiddly
MediaWiki-specific details that you need to understand properly, like
how external storage works.
In short, I'm looking to revive the much-delayed
effort to get real forum
support implemented and deployed to major WMF projects, and offering to
contribute and head up this effort myself. What will it take, and what's the
best answer to the hard design questions? What have we learned from
LiquidThreads? Considering all the schema changes since LiquidThreads, is it
better to use it as a starting point, or to do something new? Any feedback
is appreciated.
I don't know enough about LiquidThreads to comment intelligently on
it, unfortunately.