I am writing to invite you to preview and hopefully contribute to
Gather [1], a new MediaWiki extension that allows users to create,
share, and discover lists of articles. Gather is currently available
for all users of the mobile site who have opted in to beta. This
launch was primarily for the community to test it and to pardon the
pun... gather... some data. We would love for you to try it out and
share your feedback with us.
The best way to explain what Gather lists are is to contrast them with
existing facilities for grouping articles: categories and list
articles. Categories and list articles exist in subject namespaces,
and their goal is to provide navigational links for articles whose
subjects share some common, defining property. Gather lists have a
similar goal of facilitating content discovery but differ in that they
allow users the ability to group articles on the basis of any
criterion, whether this be overtly subjective and irreverent
("articles I enjoy"); curated on the basis of cultivated tastes and
informed opinions ("the most groundbreaking discoveries in
chemistry"); educational at a more localised level ("Pages that Mr
Robson's A-level chemistry students should read") or simply a
personal todo list ("articles i want to edit/read today").
The Gather lists you create are currently your own [A] and you decide
whether or not they are visible to others [B].
To see some example lists check out:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Gather/by/Jdlrobson/23
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Gather/by/Jdlrobson/35
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Gather/by/Sonasonic/71
If you want to have a go at making your own lists you have two options
(both require a mediawiki account):
1) Opt in to mobile site beta:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MobileOptions&retu…
and then interact with the watchstar
2) Try it out on Vector [C]:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jdlrobson/vector.js
To build this we have looked at the existing watchlist code, the
Collections extension, the multiple lists in core RFC and the many
feature requests around watchlist that span the lifetime of this
project. Apologies in advance for lack of documentation, sometimes
talking and back and forth over IRC/coffee is more productive then
writing extensive documentation, but I promise you the team has been
listening to all sorts of use cases.
As a result I think now we have the first essential building block -
the ability for a user to store and access a structured public or
private list.
We have APIs that will allow you to:
* create new lists that are private or public
* edit lists
* add and remove pages to those lists
* query lists
* moderators to hide troublesome lists
* manipulate the watchlist which has special handling to turn it into
a collection
Next up on the immediate roadmap for those that are interested:
* Fixing up API bugs, missing documentation
* Pagination was sorely missing from the first release. Code for that
has merged so that's coming soon.
* Polishing the existing user experience and working out how to port
that to desktop
* Improving on moderation tools
* The ability for multiple users to share and manage a list
* Combining the data inside a list with other data e.g. recent changes
to make multiple watchlists. I have a first version of this patch
ready for review [3] and working towards the goal of public/private
watchlists [4].
We have a long way to go and I guess this is the main reason I'm
writing this mail - I'm hoping to collect more help from across our
community.
If you are interested in helping feel free to reach out to me off list
on irc (user jdlrobson) or poke around Phabricator [5].
Thanks for the read!
Jon
[1]
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Gather
[2]
http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=edit…
[3]
https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/200181/
[4]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T9467
[5]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/gather/
[A] In the future we would love to support collaborative editing of
collections. Any one interested in helping?
[B] ... Although currently the UI only supports public lists... API
supports both. Help us build that out.
[C] Highly experimental - this is still a WIP and may have lots of
kinks. I would love a volunteer full time to help me with the desktop
experience. It should be noted that the Gather extension works on
desktop, but we've de-scoped the work there whilst UX standardisation
is ongoing and to limit the workload so we can actually get things
done quickly. There is currently a dependency on MobileFrontend for
convenience but we hope to drop that very soon
(
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T94100).
[D] (albeit badly documented - patches welcomed!