On 04/12/2013 10:42 AM, Richa Jain wrote:
Hi, i have written a rough draft for my proposal to outreach program and gsoc and need your suggestions regarding this. http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Rjain/Gsoc-Prototyping-inline-comments .
Thank you.
Richa Jain, thanks for sending around this link! It would be great if you could add more links to your user page so we can see the code you wrote for "Experiences at IITR", the hubot script, and so on.
What is your aim for this project? Would you try to get it deployed onto Wikimedia Foundation websites such as Wikipedia? Or is this meant to be an extension that other "third-party" wikis, such as http://practicalplants.org/ or http://en.battlestarwiki.org/ or http://wiki.blender.org/ , use instead of talk pages? I can tell you that for an idea like this, the former is orders of magnitude more difficult and probably impossible in the scope of a GSoC project (I am not exaggerating). If, as your title implies, you really just want to come up with a prototype, please clarify this in your proposal.
For a project like this, it seems to me that interaction design is crucial, as is learning from the past experiences we've had regarding discussion functionality in MediaWiki. For instance, what lessons have you learned from looking at LiquidThreads, DiscussionThreading, Comments, SemanticComments, ArticleComments, or Commentbox?
Just think of an article stating a debatable fact. It would probably attract people to make inline comments stating the fact rather than using the talk page.
I'm not quite sure what you are saying here; are you implying that it is currently a problem that people are using talk pages to debate particular passages or sentences within articles? I think we would still have to have talk pages or similar functionality in order to allow people to discuss the article as a whole, and so the design of any additional functionality would have to ensure that the discussion didn't fragment. So, I encourage you to gather and write a lot of user stories, problem definitions, research, and so on in order to better ensure your plan is doable and to ensure you're making something people can use! The design list https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/design would be helpful to consult.
Hope this helps.