Ho-ho-ho,
yes, it's a little early, but the presents I bring are not completely finished either.
My test site [1] now features three features that will, hopefully, ease some of the pains of reliability and every-day work at wikipedia.
The first one you know, the validation feature, in its current incarnation. It has already been pre-field-tested by some people from the German wikipedia.
The other one we talked about, the "stable version". This is a currently a very basic implementation, and will be overhauled by me to add some usability and reduce confusion (e.g., clicking "edit" on the stable version page).
The third one I talked about, but noone saw it yet, so here it is: Task management! (you gonna love this!)
First, I made some screenshots [2] for the people who don't have time to read boring text or try it live :-) Still with me? Great! The task management feature is intended to replace both the category-and-template based tags like "cleanup" or "wikify", and the very-long-page-based things like AfD. (Please, don't start yet another thread about keep/turn off AfD here!) If you go try it out, better get a user account; so much more fun (can't change tasks as an anon).
Executive summary: * Article sidebar ** All open tasks for a page will be displayed in the sidebar of the article * New tab "Tasks" ** Create new tasks, look at and modify existing tasks for that page ** "Create" ("please create a blank page for a poor anon") and "Write" ("Requested articles") tasks available for non-existing articles ** Tasks can be closed ("closed" or "won't fix") ** You can assign yourself a task; it will be marked as such, so no more double effort and edit conflict :-) ** Every task, for every page, can have its own discussion page, in a "Task:" namespace. On these pages, there's backlink and info for the task * New "Special:Tasks" page ** List your own assignments (so you won't forget them :-) ** Search for (open) tasks
After a long, *long* weekend with little, *little* sleep, resulting in more than 1000 lines of code for this feature alone, I hereby declare it "running" :-)
Once I'm rested again, I'll look into additional functions: * Search for tasks concerning pages in certain categories (yes, that will include "parent" categories, I hope!) * Auto assignment: You can sign up for "wikification duty"; a "wikify" task will be assigned to you, and once you did it, as a reward, you'll get the next one :-)
Emerging into coma right about ... now! :-)
Magnus
[1] http://www.magnusmanske.de/wikipeerdia/index.php [2] http://www.magnusmanske.de/tasks/
Magnus Manske wrote:
The first one you know, the validation feature, in its current incarnation. It has already been pre-field-tested by some people from the German wikipedia.
This is still going to need rewriting before we can safely use it.
The other one we talked about, the "stable version". This is a currently a very basic implementation, and will be overhauled by me to add some usability and reduce confusion (e.g., clicking "edit" on the stable version page).
Please confirm that you have talked with Tim, who is already working on version tagging keeping our caching requirements in mind.
The third one I talked about, but noone saw it yet, so here it is: Task management! (you gonna love this!)
Will look this over later...
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion Vibber wrote:
Magnus Manske wrote:
The first one you know, the validation feature, in its current incarnation. It has already been pre-field-tested by some people from the German wikipedia.
This is still going to need rewriting before we can safely use it.
What's wrong with it, and how much work do you think needs to be done?
Article version rating/validation/moderation/whatever is my number one anticipated feature, and I've been responding to various peoples' criticisms of Wikipedia's "trustworthiness" with the suggestion that we'll be implementing something along these lines Real Soon Now for what feels like years. I'm hoping it might even help get us out of the endless AfD argument by providing a means of quality control that will appease both sides. Please tell me we're almost there for real this time.
The other stuff in this Christmas present all looks great too, way to go Magnus! Automated task management like that should make it a lot easier to ensure that quality is consistent across Wikipedia and that problem articles aren't "lost" in the vastness.
Bryan Derksen wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
Magnus Manske wrote:
The first one you know, the validation feature, in its current incarnation. It has already been pre-field-tested by some people from the German wikipedia.
This is still going to need rewriting before we can safely use it.
What's wrong with it, and how much work do you think needs to be done?
Lots of missing input validation and missing output escaping. There were still several cross-site scripting injection points when I last lost count.
(A cross-site scripting vulnerability could be used to take over an admin's account if you can trick them into visiting a link while logged in on the wiki. From there you could add malicious JavaScript code which will be shown to every other visitor, potentially hijacking many more accounts, as well as performing any action on the wiki: deleting, renaming, undeleting pages, etc. You could also try triggering browser vulnerabilities to take over the computers of any visitors using unpatched older browsers.)
Going over it with a fine-toothed comb looking for the bugs is tedious and error-prone; there's lots of raw HTML output (very easy to make mistakes) and the source and type of input data is hard to track. My inclination is to rip it out and rewrite it as a clean extension with clearer data paths (I recommended that Magnus write it as an extension when he started). It's probably not more than a couple days' work, really, modulo other distractions.
Article version rating/validation/moderation/whatever is my number one anticipated feature, and I've been responding to various peoples' criticisms of Wikipedia's "trustworthiness" with the suggestion that we'll be implementing something along these lines Real Soon Now for what feels like years.
Well, this feature won't do much of anything about trustworthiness. A review team marking stable revisions, and proper visible disclaimers on unstable development drafts, might.
-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)
Brion Vibber wrote:
Well, this feature won't do much of anything about trustworthiness. A review team marking stable revisions, and proper visible disclaimers on unstable development drafts, might.
Yeah, but this sort of functionality is important for getting those versions labelled. As Wikipedia currently stands the only way to refer to specific versions of articles is via full-URL links that the wiki software doesn't understand any differently than external links, so there's no convenient way to mark those stable revisions or have the wiki display appropriately specific disclaimers on them.
Just the fact of having this feature enabled does nothing by itself, of course, it would be silly to claim otherwise. It's the subsequent _use_ of it to label things that will allow us to answer "you can check the article's validation status to get a sense of how trustworthy it is" to our critics' objections.
Brion Vibber wrote:
Magnus Manske wrote:
The first one you know, the validation feature, in its current incarnation. It has already been pre-field-tested by some people from the German wikipedia.
This is still going to need rewriting before we can safely use it.
Well, it could've been ready right now, if you had told me what's wrong when I asked, about a dozen times, for month...
The other one we talked about, the "stable version". This is a currently a very basic implementation, and will be overhauled by me to add some usability and reduce confusion (e.g., clicking "edit" on the stable version page).
Please confirm that you have talked with Tim, who is already working on version tagging keeping our caching requirements in mind.
No I didn't, I wasn't aware to that. (Which probably means I heared about it but promptly forgot;-)
Anyway, mine is very simple: a new field in the page table, indication the current "stable" version, or "0" if there is none. And a small notice in the sub-header, with links.
Tim, if yours is more advances/better integrated/favorable in some other way, please tell me so I won't waste any more time on my implementation here.
Magnus
Magnus Manske wrote:
No I didn't, I wasn't aware to that. (Which probably means I heared about it but promptly forgot;-)
Anyway, mine is very simple: a new field in the page table, indication the current "stable" version, or "0" if there is none. And a small notice in the sub-header, with links.
Tim, if yours is more advances/better integrated/favorable in some other way, please tell me so I won't waste any more time on my implementation here.
That's the same as Salvatore's feature. Whether it'll be good enough or not depends on whether we need a tag table indexed by revision for our caching system. See my discussion of this on wikitech-l.
-- Tim Starling
Here are some of my suggestions: 1) Name pages "Task:Main_Page/Cleanup" or "Task:Main_Page/Cleanup/20051225" with a fallback such as "Task:Main_Page/Cleanup/20051225_2" or "Task:Main_Page/Cleanup/R3m0t" or something! I think date would be best. 2) Alias "Special:Assignments" to the "?title=Special:Tasks&mode=myassignments" behaviour. :) 3) "Search Tasks Cleanup Wikify Rewrite Delete Create Write (No selection here will search all task types.) Status Open Assigned Closed Won't fix Sort Oldest first" Remove the text "(No selection here will search all task types.)" (but keep the related behaviour) and also tick all the task types by default to prevent ambiguity. Then again, if somebody wants to filter by task... well, perhaps you should wait for somebody to agree or disagree with me before implementing it. 4) So will you write a feature to allow admins/trusted people to edit the task types? :)
On 11/12/05, Magnus Manske magnus.manske@web.de wrote:
Ho-ho-ho, The third one I talked about, but noone saw it yet, so here it is: Task management! (you gonna love this!)
Am Samstag, den 17.12.2005, 20:16 +0000 schrieb Tomer Chachamu:
Here are some of my suggestions:
Thanks, feedback is always welcome :-)
- Name pages "Task:Main_Page/Cleanup" or
"Task:Main_Page/Cleanup/20051225" with a fallback such as "Task:Main_Page/Cleanup/20051225_2" or "Task:Main_Page/Cleanup/R3m0t" or something! I think date would be best.
I think it's best they stay "Task:" plus task number: * If they include the page title, what if the page is moved? * If they contain the task type, they become ambiguous Originally, the task type was part of the name, but I changed that to the current style. Additionally, detailed information is given in the "Task:" page header about original page, task type, etc.
- Alias "Special:Assignments" to the
"?title=Special:Tasks&mode=myassignments" behaviour. :)
Could do. But why?
- "Search
Tasks Cleanup Wikify Rewrite Delete Create Write (No selection here will search all task types.) Status Open Assigned Closed Won't fix Sort Oldest first" Remove the text "(No selection here will search all task types.)" (but keep the related behaviour) and also tick all the task types by default to prevent ambiguity. Then again, if somebody wants to filter by task... well, perhaps you should wait for somebody to agree or disagree with me before implementing it.
That would mean if I want to search for a single task type, I'd have to unckeck all the others (I'm sure there will be more in a live version than in my demo implementation). The notice can be altered or removed through the usual "MediaWiki:Message" mechanism.
- So will you write a feature to allow admins/trusted people to edit
the task types? :)
I'm not sure that there's a point in editing them. However, it might be good if admins could remove them in case an initial comment contains copyright violations, or "yo mother"-style texts ;-)
Magnus
Am Samstag, den 17.12.2005, 21:40 +0100 schrieb Magnus Manske:
- So will you write a feature to allow admins/trusted people to edit
the task types? :)
I'm not sure that there's a point in editing them. However, it might be good if admins could remove them in case an initial comment contains copyright violations, or "yo mother"-style texts ;-)
Admins can now delete tasks. The action is logged.
Magnus
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