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.
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 :
1. Is extensions management a significant issue for you? Would you like
to see efforts focused on it?
2. What should extensions be rated on?
3. Who should be rating extensions?
4. How could it be implemented reusing existing resources maximally?
5. What else would be useful to have in extensions management?
6. Are there any good examples on how it's done on other platforms you
would like to point out?
7. 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