On 8/25/06, Tim Starling t.starling@physics.unimelb.edu.au wrote:
Most developers have specialisations -- some of us hate UI design and love DB performance optimisation, others don't know any PHP but can speak HTML/CSS like a second language. This is a problem for writing features for an open source web app -- the nature of the work is cross-disciplinary, but the culture encourages individual effort. The result of this is that developers are placed under pressure to learn a huge skill set, and that can be a disincentive to participation.
I really like this idea. I'd like to help develop MediaWiki, but since I don't know PHP MySQL it's going to be a learning curve before I really get started. However, I have a strong interest in user interface design and would love to colaborate. (Unfortunately, probably not for this project as I'm about to hit the road for 7 weeks of continuous travelling - lucky me).
I have an idea for a feature, and I was wondering if anyone might want to collaborate on it. The idea is to display, in a box in the edit window, information about who else has the same edit window open. For example, it could display each username, along with the amount of time they have been idle and the edit summary they have typed if any. The box will periodically refresh itself, say once every 10 seconds. At the same time as fetching updated data, the client sends back information about how long the user has been idle and so on.
Certainly an interesting idea. I have a mild concern about the use of this feature on users' talk pages (I've already had instances of two users accusing each other of monitoring my talk page for badmouthing from the other!!), but it'd be especially nice for other talk pages which get updated frequently.
If you wanted to take it even further, make it possibly to automatically resync with the server if someone else saves the page. It shouldn't be too hard to use a really granular diffing algorithm to add or remove whole paragraphs, and to just say "no, too hard" if there are any overlaps in the changes.
An optional subfeature would be allow the user to remove themselves from the box voluntarily, e.g. to signal that they have no interest in actually saving the article and that they are just looking at the source.
If you're doing all this in javascript, could you not attempt to treat them as being in "view source" mode until they actually modify the source?
I can probably be Person 3, but I don't think I can handle the other two tasks as well. Any volunteers? Anyone know anyone who might be interested?
If you don't find anyone before late October, feel free to give me a yell ;)
Steve