Well, let's be honest. Whatever the theories behind it, these are content pages, they aren't mini-watchlists or really anything even all that technically related to the watchlist wishlist. Content belongs in a content space. Whether it gets its own wikispace, or it uses userspace, is sort of irrelevant. (Actually a more pertinent question might be "why are these being designed for Mobile?" When I looked at the test pages above using a couple of different mobile phones and a tablet, they looked...well, nowhere near as useful or interesting as they look on a desktop.)
Using the Special:namespace for content requires all kinds of jury-rigged code to even to mimic normal functions like full-page deletion and revision-deletion/suppression; in fact, as far as I know, project-level administrators don't have the ability to delete pages in Special:namespace at all. We've had plenty of experience with this issue: page-level deletion is essentially impossible in several modules that have been designed to operate away from the wikipage model (including Flow and AFT), and the "alternative" to revision-deletion/suppression is pretty much jury-rigged, unreliable, and...well, is essentially what is being proposed for Extension:Gather too. In other words, from the perspective of someone who is going to have to deal with these pages once they're created, they don't work very well, and I can't do some of the things I ought to be able to do with them, and no good explanation of why I shouldn't be able to delete them outright or why I shouldn't be able to revision-delete/supress things instead of making do with sort-of-similar tools that aren't written robustly.
Special:namespace has pretty solidly always been the back room and/or engine room of the project; take a look at the list of special pages, and it's obvious that content-specific, user-specific pages do not belong in the same classification as anything else that's there. It simply makes no sense to put it there.
If it is absolutely necessary that properties specific to the Special:namespace be made available to run Extension:Gather, then create a new namespace with the same properties for Gather. If there is some really good, obvious, well-documented reason why this extension absolutely needs those special properties to be workable (and not "it's easier" or "well, maybe we can use this to build something else") then give its own namespace that is devoted to user-generated or personalized "special" pages - but the case hasn't really been made for it, and it creates a lot more work to write robust code for deletion and revdelete/suppress that will operate on those pages, when both of those are covered by well-written, robust, heavily tested and used code now.
I would have thought that having to constantly write new extension-specific code for these basic admin functions would have gotten tiresome for the developers by now.
Risker/Anne
On 8 April 2015 at 13:58, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
The main motivation for lists as not being wikipages is so that they can be combined with the recent changes feed and other things stored in the database. We'll also hoping to support the filtering of collections via tags which becomes much easier if stored in a database. A watchlist is not a wikipage, so that in my eyes sets a precedent.
We have plenty of options to surface edits to collections as items in the recent changes if necessary. It would be most helpful to articulate what the problems are, rather than say "wikipages are the solution!" This might prove to be true but without understanding the inadequacies of the current approach we won't be able to pass that judgement.. so please test and provide that feedback and we'll find the right solutions.
Thanks for your feedback thus far.
On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 8:52 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) nemowiki@gmail.com wrote:
I hope no 60 storey building is in the making. The bazaar is horizontal,
a
vertical suk is too similar to a cathedral.
Nemo
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