New subject: [Mediawiki-l] MediaWiki Enhancement for Discussion Threading

5 Apr 2007

Many of my developers and project managers like threading for discussions.
In order to get greater adoption, I've developed an extension/patch that
makes the discussion page look like the archives of a listserv.  Don't know
if this is even worth consideration, but in the spirit of openness thought I
would throw it out.  If there's time and interest, I'll clean it up and make
it generally available - right now it's very experimental - although we're
using it here in production.

I've posted this highly experimental patch/extension at
http://www.mediawiki.org/Wiki/Extension:DiscussionThreading
<http://www.mediawiki.org/Wiki/Extension:DiscussionThreading> 

This extension implements a discussion threading process. This threading
will only be seen on the talk pages, unless explicitly invoked in the
command line.

It adds a [reply] link on the header line. Each time a new posting is
entered or a posting is replied to, the comment will automatically be tagged
(and appear in the TOC too). Of course direct editing can occur, but this
really makes it a lot easier to organize discussions in a threading view
that most are familiar with.

To do (if there's enough interest):

1.	Internationalize 
2.	get someone who knows regex to clean up the parsing of the subject
line 
3.	Assess to see if there's an easier way to do this - I've probably
screwed it up royally.

Montgomery County Shield <http://www.montcopa.org/> 	 Jack D. Pond
CIO, Montgomery County, PA

"Nothing in the world is more dangerous than sincere ignorance and
conscientious stupidity." -- Martin Luther King, Jr. (1929-1968)