Is it necessary to request deletion of a local user page in order to get the global page to be automatically transcluded?
Pine
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On Fri, Feb 20, 2015 at 11:17 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
Hi.
Erwin Dokter wrote:
On 20-02-2015 18:22, Dan Garry wrote:
The feature is currently deployed and working. Simply set up your userpage on Meta, and it'll display on all other wikis! :-)
After having played with it a bit, I must conclude there is one major shortcoming.
I like to list my subpages locally, but that is not possible with a global page.
I think what you're saying here is that if your global user page contains "{{Special:PrefixIndex/User:Example}}", this transclusion will expand in the context of the global wiki, not in the context of the local wiki.
The most annoying thing is that once you create the local user page, the global one is gone forever... until you can get a local admin to delete the local copy again.
It would be much more practical if this worked like Commons description pages, where one can *add* content to the local description pages in addition to the trancluded page.
Gone forever seems a bit hyperbolic. :-) The use-case being solved here most directly is "I don't want to create my user page or a pointer to my user page on over 800 wikis." I think the append model is interesting to consider, but I think it would likely need to be opt-in, perhaps via interwiki transclusion.
I also don't know why the system is so inflexible in that only one wiki can act as the global home wiki. I know there are issues with the home wiki flag, but another approach could be in the form of using {{meta:user:Edokter}}, which could point to any project.
Right, you're basically suggesting interwiki transclusion here. This is definitely a hard problem to solve, for the context reason alone.
In discussing global user pages, someone privately criticized the implementation with basically the same theme of what you're saying here. Namely, that global user pages are only solving a narrow use-case and that the more generalized problem of easy content distribution/re-use still needs to be addressed. I definitely agree, but here's why I pushed this project forward and why I'm happy with where we're headed:
Perfect is the enemy of the done. We have global user pages today. If a better approach for global user pages comes along in the future, we can switch to using that instead, for sure.
We're working on a more generalized solution: <https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Shadow_namespaces
.
Nemo also pointed me toward https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T66474 which may interest you.
Please share your thoughts and feedback on the wiki or in Phabricator or on this mailing list. I think there's consensus that we have a pattern of a problem that we want to solve and any help poking and prodding at ideas for solutions to this problem would be most welcome.
MZMcBride
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