Hi! I'm thinking on writing a gadget to add inline comments to articles, similar to how Google Docs comments work.
However, I'm sure I recently read somewhere about someone developing an extension or something with the same goal, but now I can't find it anywhere. Anyone knows?
Thanks!
There is an extension https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:InlineComments
There's some past discussion of this type of thing here:
- https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T149667 - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T312760
Kosta
On 8. Dec 2023 at 10:12:08, Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com wrote:
Hi! I'm thinking on writing a gadget to add inline comments to articles, similar to how Google Docs comments work.
However, I'm sure I recently read somewhere about someone developing an extension or something with the same goal, but now I can't find it anywhere. Anyone knows?
Thanks! _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
I don't have a particular opinion on this, except that inline comments that are publicly visible must be able to be moderated by the community, and that smaller communities in particular should be able to opt out of this extension. They sound like a great idea, but we're much more likely to get comments like "this isn't true" or "this [highly unreliable website] disagrees", and that just creates problems for readers. We can assume good faith until the cows come home, but we should also be realistic and realize that those comments are going to make our articles look more like Twitter and Facebook; that is, they'll be opportunities for disinformation.
Risker/Anne
On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 at 05:43, Kosta Harlan kharlan@wikimedia.org wrote:
There is an extension https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:InlineComments
There's some past discussion of this type of thing here:
Kosta
On 8. Dec 2023 at 10:12:08, Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com wrote:
Hi! I'm thinking on writing a gadget to add inline comments to articles, similar to how Google Docs comments work.
However, I'm sure I recently read somewhere about someone developing an extension or something with the same goal, but now I can't find it anywhere. Anyone knows?
Thanks! _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
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I don't think comments on live articles would be useful (as mentioned above) but there are many cases which it can be a game changer. I can think of a couple:
- Collaborative drafting: When you want to draft policy, a proposal, a new article, etc. with one or more fellow Wikimedians - Using as a replacement for google docs in many private wikis (as both for Wikimedia and third party corporate installations). We already have collab-pad https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Real-time_collaboration which allows users to turn VE into an etherpad. I would love to see that get off the ground. - Reviewing a nomination for good or featured article: For example, take a look at a recent FAC https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Alpine_ibex/archive1&redirect=no. The reviewer highlights a sentence in the discussion page and makes a comment about it and that's quite...labor intensive. Having a way to allow commenting which would be only visible to a small group of users would be quite nice.
It shouldn't be too hard to implement but not super trivial either. MediaWiki is open source and extendable (via extensions) and I would appreciate any work on it!
Am Fr., 8. Dez. 2023 um 21:09 Uhr schrieb Risker risker.wp@gmail.com:
I don't have a particular opinion on this, except that inline comments that are publicly visible must be able to be moderated by the community, and that smaller communities in particular should be able to opt out of this extension. They sound like a great idea, but we're much more likely to get comments like "this isn't true" or "this [highly unreliable website] disagrees", and that just creates problems for readers. We can assume good faith until the cows come home, but we should also be realistic and realize that those comments are going to make our articles look more like Twitter and Facebook; that is, they'll be opportunities for disinformation.
Risker/Anne
On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 at 05:43, Kosta Harlan kharlan@wikimedia.org wrote:
There is an extension https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:InlineComments
There's some past discussion of this type of thing here:
Kosta
On 8. Dec 2023 at 10:12:08, Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com wrote:
Hi! I'm thinking on writing a gadget to add inline comments to articles, similar to how Google Docs comments work.
However, I'm sure I recently read somewhere about someone developing an extension or something with the same goal, but now I can't find it anywhere. Anyone knows?
Thanks! _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
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I once dealt with developing a similar thing, that worked like this: * https://wikicomment.ut.ee/pics/search_video.mp4 * https://wikicomment.ut.ee/pics/tools_video.mp4 * https://wikicomment.ut.ee/pics/act1_video.mp4 * https://wikicomment.ut.ee/pics/act2_video.mp4 * https://wikicomment.ut.ee/pics/act3_video.mp4 * https://wikicomment.ut.ee/pics/act4_video.mp4
It is no longer maintained and is therefore broken.
Ivo Kruusamägi
Kontakt Amir Sarabadani (ladsgroup@gmail.com) kirjutas kuupäeval L, 9. detsember 2023 kell 03:46:
I don't think comments on live articles would be useful (as mentioned above) but there are many cases which it can be a game changer. I can think of a couple:
- Collaborative drafting: When you want to draft policy, a proposal, a
new article, etc. with one or more fellow Wikimedians
- Using as a replacement for google docs in many private wikis (as
both for Wikimedia and third party corporate installations). We already have collab-pad https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/VisualEditor/Real-time_collaboration which allows users to turn VE into an etherpad. I would love to see that get off the ground.
- Reviewing a nomination for good or featured article: For example,
take a look at a recent FAC https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Featured_article_candidates/Alpine_ibex/archive1&redirect=no. The reviewer highlights a sentence in the discussion page and makes a comment about it and that's quite...labor intensive. Having a way to allow commenting which would be only visible to a small group of users would be quite nice.
It shouldn't be too hard to implement but not super trivial either. MediaWiki is open source and extendable (via extensions) and I would appreciate any work on it!
Am Fr., 8. Dez. 2023 um 21:09 Uhr schrieb Risker risker.wp@gmail.com:
I don't have a particular opinion on this, except that inline comments that are publicly visible must be able to be moderated by the community, and that smaller communities in particular should be able to opt out of this extension. They sound like a great idea, but we're much more likely to get comments like "this isn't true" or "this [highly unreliable website] disagrees", and that just creates problems for readers. We can assume good faith until the cows come home, but we should also be realistic and realize that those comments are going to make our articles look more like Twitter and Facebook; that is, they'll be opportunities for disinformation.
Risker/Anne
On Fri, 8 Dec 2023 at 05:43, Kosta Harlan kharlan@wikimedia.org wrote:
There is an extension https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:InlineComments
There's some past discussion of this type of thing here:
Kosta
On 8. Dec 2023 at 10:12:08, Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com wrote:
Hi! I'm thinking on writing a gadget to add inline comments to articles, similar to how Google Docs comments work.
However, I'm sure I recently read somewhere about someone developing an extension or something with the same goal, but now I can't find it anywhere. Anyone knows?
Thanks! _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
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-- Amir (he/him)
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I'm curious if your plans are for a Wikimedia wiki, Felipe?
Since people are pointing out learnings from similar experiments, I would like to add another one: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Article_feedback/Version_5. There are a lot of subpages with a lot of information.
ArticleFeedback version 5 added a comment box at the end of every article. It was highly "successful" in so far that people used it a lot. A lot of the comments said something like "finally I can leave comments on Wikipedia articles". Like talk pages would not exist. Something like 95% of the comments added this way are entirely inactionable (e.g. asking for things that are already in the article), and the rest of questionable value.
Kind regards Thiemo
On 12/8/23 03:12, Felipe Schenone wrote:
Hi! I'm thinking on writing a gadget to add inline comments to articles, similar to how Google Docs comments work.
However, I'm sure I recently read somewhere about someone developing an extension or something with the same goal, but now I can't find it anywhere. Anyone knows?
https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2023/Extension_for_creat... may be what you heard about?
Subbu.
Thanks everyone for all the info, pointers and comments! @Subbu: Indeed that was the one I read about, thanks! @Thiemo: What I'm thinking of is a *gadget*, so it would be available on Wikimedia wikis (and any other) but only for users that choose to enable it (similar to my gadget MiniEdit https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MiniEdit).
The gadget would allow its users to highlight some text and publish a comment to the talk page along with the highlighted text and parent paragraph (for context). Like so:
In ancient times, the use of solar energy was believed to have existed in
civilizations amidst the Greeks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece, Romans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome and the Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_China, though not for cooking.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker#cite_note-3
Did it exist or not? The source says it did, so if no objections are raised, I'll remove this.
Only users with the gadget enabled would be able to see the highlighted text and comment in the article itself. The rest would only see it in the talk page.
Because of the way I'm thinking the gadget would work, if the wikitext/HTML of the parent paragraph changes (for example because the issue got fixed), then the comment would stop showing in the article to users with the gadget enabled. This is because the wikitext/HTML of the paragraph itself would act as the anchor or identifier that would allow the gadget to know where to insert the comment. This may be sub-optimal in some cases, but it's the only way I can think of doing it without having the gadget insert things into the wikitext of the article (which would be a definitive no-no). In any case, the comments would always be available in the talk page.
To be honest though, some of your comments have made me question if this could be useful, but I think given the way it would work, and considering it would be an optional gadget that won't be available to random visitors, it should be harmless, and time will tell if it ever becomes popular. I'm working on a crude prototype and will share it shortly. Any insights, ideas or comments are welcome!
Kind regards,
On Sun, Dec 10, 2023 at 11:28 PM Subramanya Sastry ssastry@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 12/8/23 03:12, Felipe Schenone wrote:
Hi! I'm thinking on writing a gadget to add inline comments to articles, similar to how Google Docs comments work.
However, I'm sure I recently read somewhere about someone developing an extension or something with the same goal, but now I can't find it anywhere. Anyone knows?
https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2023/Extension_for_creat... may be what you heard about?
Subbu. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
If you just want to annotate a web page without assistance from that page, and let you share then annotations, that's not a Wikimedia-specific problem and there are generic tools for it. The popular one is Hypothesis https://web.hypothes.is/about/, I think. There even was an attempt to build something Wikimedia-specific on top of it (see the task Kosta linked), but it can be used directly as well.
+1 to Hypothesis and similar tools kind of already doing what you're thinking of. I would use the energy to contribute to it: https://github.com/hypothesis/client, and it's possible that you might find ways to optimize it for wikis via a gadget.
They've probably solved the "parent paragraph updating" problem you mentioned here. So at the very least you can find inspiration there. But I imagine the issue of storage and all that is tricky. There was a W3C working group that the Hypothesis people were part of, I remember we half-heartedly wanted to join but never did.
On Tue, Dec 12, 2023 at 7:41 PM Gergő Tisza gtisza@gmail.com wrote:
If you just want to annotate a web page without assistance from that page, and let you share then annotations, that's not a Wikimedia-specific problem and there are generic tools for it. The popular one is Hypothesis https://web.hypothes.is/about/, I think. There even was an attempt to build something Wikimedia-specific on top of it (see the task Kosta linked), but it can be used directly as well. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/postorius/lists/wikitech-l.lists.wikimedia.org/
This is *such* a good idea. Very much the way "Talk" should be implemented by default, and would be transformative for the sorts of edtind and collab I do on live as well as draft articles.
Most readers dont know Talk exists; most logged in readers dont take time to check talk when browsing, new updates to talk make no impact on the page if you don't look, most talk sections relate.to specific paragraphs and words, &c :)
=== To some of the concerns:
Comments should be editable / revertable by others, just as Talk is now.
Any edits are a vector for potential spam and misinfo. These would be edits. Not a new problem, but this should check page protection before making the hook that's visible to all gadget users. (Maybe if protection blocked it can still generate the talk of section, with the same templates link from the talk page to the appropriate article section/snippet, but not show up on the article view?)
Hypothesis is still pretty all or nothing, can't do the above or sync w Talk pg.
🌍🌏🌎🌑
On Mon, Dec 11, 2023, 5:12 AM Felipe Schenone schenonef@gmail.com wrote:
Thanks everyone for all the info, pointers and comments! @Subbu: Indeed that was the one I read about, thanks! @Thiemo: What I'm thinking of is a *gadget*, so it would be available on Wikimedia wikis (and any other) but only for users that choose to enable it (similar to my gadget MiniEdit https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/MiniEdit).
The gadget would allow its users to highlight some text and publish a comment to the talk page along with the highlighted text and parent paragraph (for context). Like so:
In ancient times, the use of solar energy was believed to have existed in
civilizations amidst the Greeks https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Greece, Romans https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_Rome and the Chinese https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancient_China, though not for cooking.[3] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Solar_cooker#cite_note-3
Did it exist or not? The source says it did, so if no objections are raised, I'll remove this.
Only users with the gadget enabled would be able to see the highlighted text and comment in the article itself. The rest would only see it in the talk page.
Because of the way I'm thinking the gadget would work, if the wikitext/HTML of the parent paragraph changes (for example because the issue got fixed), then the comment would stop showing in the article to users with the gadget enabled. This is because the wikitext/HTML of the paragraph itself would act as the anchor or identifier that would allow the gadget to know where to insert the comment. This may be sub-optimal in some cases, but it's the only way I can think of doing it without having the gadget insert things into the wikitext of the article (which would be a definitive no-no). In any case, the comments would always be available in the talk page.
To be honest though, some of your comments have made me question if this could be useful, but I think given the way it would work, and considering it would be an optional gadget that won't be available to random visitors, it should be harmless, and time will tell if it ever becomes popular. I'm working on a crude prototype and will share it shortly. Any insights, ideas or comments are welcome!
Kind regards,
On Sun, Dec 10, 2023 at 11:28 PM Subramanya Sastry ssastry@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 12/8/23 03:12, Felipe Schenone wrote:
Hi! I'm thinking on writing a gadget to add inline comments to articles, similar to how Google Docs comments work.
However, I'm sure I recently read somewhere about someone developing an extension or something with the same goal, but now I can't find it anywhere. Anyone knows?
https://www.semantic-mediawiki.org/wiki/SMWCon_Fall_2023/Extension_for_creat... may be what you heard about?
Subbu. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list -- wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe send an email to wikitech-l-leave@lists.wikimedia.org
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