On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 12:17 PM, Brian Wolff bawolff@gmail.com wrote:
On Apr 8, 2015 2:59 PM, "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.
To be nitpicky, not only is it possible to combine rc with wikipages, its been supported (and mostly unused) for ages in the form of special:recentchangeslinked. More structured lists could be done with content handler (as with all things there are pros and cons to such an approach).
but this wouldn't scale for a Watchlist view - which basically does a JOIN on recent changes with the items in that collection. The experimental http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:GatherEditFeed which provides a multiple watchlist type feature is only possible because it is done in a database. If you believe there is a way to do that, I'd love to see a prototype from you proving me wrong :-).
We'll also hoping to support the filtering of collections via tags which becomes much easier if stored in a database.
"Tags" is another jargon quaigmire in mw land....
Anyways no particular reason why stuff can't be canonically on a wikipage and extracted to db tables (in a similar fashion to link tables). Doing that gives you history, reverting, oversight, collaborative editing, talk pages, etc for free. (But of course im sure that has its own drawbacks)
[Also its important to keep in mind: it is easy to wax poetic on the mailing list about how something ought to be done, much harder to actually do it. So take my comment with the salt appropriate of somebody who hasn't implemented anything nor has any plans to]
A watchlist is not a wikipage, so that in my eyes sets a precedent.
Its also unequivocally private. I think a lot of the conflict here comes from the dual nature of gather as public/private.
True, but given we as a community apparently want truely public watchlists it's time to work out what that looks like :)
I think a closer precedent would be abuse filters, but the system for editing such things is probably much less popular than watchlists.
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.
I think the problem is one of integration. People want anything publically editable to be consistent. Earlier in this thread TheDJ made a comparison to building an office tower with duct tape. Well he has a fair point about hacky solutions, to extend the metaphor, nobody wants an office tower built of fifty different materials either, they want a unified building that looks integrated and consistent. Using wiki pages gives integration with all current site features and any future site feautres which don't exist yet, for free.
Agreed, this is definitely an integration problem. I'd like us to generalise our existing site features and make them less like duct tape. There is very little code abstraction which has traditionally made this difficult. I think when we say "this should be a wiki page" we actually mean something different - in that what we are really saying is "this should integrate with recent changes" or this should integrate with X. Identifying those problems will move us forward as we will find solutions to them and build better software. Starting with "it should be a wikipage" is approaching the problem from the wrong direction. This may turn out to be the solution but it's not a good way to write software efficiently.
Thanks for your feedback thus far.
I appreciate that you are taking the feedback in stride. Some of it has been quite harsh, and if it was me, I would probably be pretty defensive at this point.
I truly do want to build the right thing and I really do believe what we have built so far is well architected (but not perfect). I really do encourage you to identify the gaping holes in this infrastructure so these conversations can become actionable and we can go beyond the wikipage.
--bawolff
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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