On Thu, Sep 11, 2008 at 7:29 PM, Vivian Landers vivianlanders@gmail.com wrote:
Hi all, I'm new to this list, but I'm sure this topic has come up many times before. In short, wiki syntax is inadequate for structuring discussion pages, and Mediawiki needs a forum system. LiquidThreads is the most significant effort in this direction, and it's a big step forward, but the project is apparently dead and it's not being adopted by WMF.
It's not dead, so the answer is probably just to be more aggressive about getting it adopted by the WMF. I suspect it will have serious performance issues that will need to be worked out before it's usable by Wikipedia.
There's still significant disagreement about a few specific issues like whether users, just admins, or no one should be permitted to edit comments of others, or move threads from one discussion page to another
As far as I'm concerned, there is not any disagreement that's significant, at least with respect to Wikimedia. We're talking about a *wiki* discussion system. Allow open editing and preserve histories, it's as simple as that. If someone wants to add options that non-Wikimedia administrators can configure if it's useful to them, I don't necessarily have any problem with that.
There's a significant migration problem: what to do with the massive reams of content existing on discussion pages and in discussion archives?
Not a big issue. Any discussion page will need to have some section that's editable like a usual wiki page, probably, to store non-discussion content: header templates, for instance. So just dump the old discussions in there.
There may also be scalability issues with creating a system that can handle the kind of load Wikipedia currently sees.
That's one of the more serious issues. I recall David was having issues in deciding on the schema, since he wanted efficient versioned trees. I don't know what he ended up settling on, but I would imagine it would have some issues when scaling up to the massive levels needed by Wikipedia. Few schemas don't. There are lots of fiddly MediaWiki-specific details that you need to understand properly, like how external storage works.
In short, I'm looking to revive the much-delayed effort to get real forum support implemented and deployed to major WMF projects, and offering to contribute and head up this effort myself. What will it take, and what's the best answer to the hard design questions? What have we learned from LiquidThreads? Considering all the schema changes since LiquidThreads, is it better to use it as a starting point, or to do something new? Any feedback is appreciated.
I don't know enough about LiquidThreads to comment intelligently on it, unfortunately.