Heiya to all of you,
when it comes to extensions, it is from a "sustainability" point of view, pretty hard for everyone, not just enterprise users, to assess if it is save to use or not. I think it takes quite some experience to avoid or at least reduce the risk of being stuck with an unmaintained extension. So yes, the visibility of maintained extensions should definitively be increased and vice versa.
I am thinking of some pledging system to overcome this problem: Authors should be able to add a pledge indicating that he or she is maintaining the extension for the current stable + the next x MW versions. Perhaps this is some kind of rating. A rating like good, neutral, bad does not really convince me as well as an "Extension of the Month" does not.
Another thing that could be improved is indeed the display of the extension's compatibility. This is however connected to the above mentioned idea.
I think it should also be possible for the authors to add a Flattr button and/or PayPal button to the extension and/or user page. Thus appreciation may be shown easily by the users of extensions.
Cheers Karsten
Am 05.02.2013 15:53, schrieb Maria Miteva:
Hello everyone,
I want to bring up the main issues we have identified with third-party users so far to the MW community and the first one is extensions management. I heard from many of you that you would like to see improvement in extensions management on mw.org http://mw.org.
Here is a summary of what I've heard so far on email and http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Third-party_MediaWiki_users_discussion :
The most important thing is to be able to immediately see the compatibility of a given extension with MW versions. If compatibility testing can be automated, that would be best. Additionally, people want to have some rating of extensions based on the quality of code, vulnerability, usefulness,etc. Statistics like number of downloads can be used as a market of quality as well. More visibility should be given to good extensions. Extensions can be separated in categories based on what they do so they can be found easily. Some suggest the use of SMW on MW.org to organize extensions even though the use of SMW on WMF websites has been discussed and decided as a wontfix ( https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=8390#c24) . Also, Yury Katkov suggested Article Feedback http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_Feedback can be used for rating or WikiVote could provide some of their voting systems.
Before I bring the issue up to the community, I would love to hear everybody's feedback. Here are some questions to consider :
- Is extensions management a significant issue for you? Would you like to see efforts focused on it?
- What should extensions be rated on?
- Who should be rating extensions?
- How could it be implemented reusing existing resources maximally?
- What else would be useful to have in extensions management?
- Are there any good examples on how it's done on other platforms you would like to point out?
- Let me know if you would be willing to/available to help with specification, implementation, testing, or anything else.
Also, add any other comments/information. I want to have as much details as possible on what people would like to see happen.
I will be sending similar emails about other "popular" issues soon.
Mariya
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