Liam Wyatt wrote:
Fabian Tompsett wrote:
We need an extension where users easily can form groups (namespace Groups: or something, used by an extension), where they easily can see the recent changes of edits of group members only
Not precisely this, but related... Is there any plan to have "folders" in a watchlist, and then the ability to make a specific folder visible (a.k.a. "shared") to others?
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2015-January/080168.html
""" The project has been dubbed "Collections", and our pilot will let users create and share collections of articles. """
Not only would this make it easier for people with very large watchlists to manage their work more easily, but this would also mean that a group (e.g. wikiproject, edithathon participants, classroom...) could easily subscribe to a shared watchlist folder. This would make it easy for them to follow each other's edits.
- A teacher or wiki-mentor could make a shared watchlist of their
student's draft pages.
- An editathon organiser could create a shared watchlist of all the
articles within the scope of the event.
- A wikiproject could create several shared watchlists to group related
articles for members to more easily monitor.
- probably many other use-cases that might emerge...
Has this been discussed/suggested before?
Yes. :-)
I think the approach the Wikimedia Foundation mobile team is taking is flawed, though. The proposed concept called "collections," in addition to being a confusing name that's already in use by another tangentially related extension, doesn't really leverage the fact that we already have shared lists of pages called categories.
The current category system has a lot of challenges: inputting categories is hard, renaming categories is hard, watching changes to category members is hard, etc. There's _a lot_ of work to be done on the aging category system, but the feature already exists and there's shared knowledge about it. However, instead of a team working to improve categories, I imagine we'll see a whole new effort built up around a vaguely similar idea ("collections") because it's a lot easier to make your own thing than improve someone else's. This development anti-pattern has unfortunately become fairly predictable, but it remains pernicious.
MZMcBride