[Mediawiki-l] Making it easier to add

[Rowan Collins]

D_C <d3ntaku at gmail.com> wrote:
> I am new to mediawiki, so a couple of questions:

> * "Guestbook"
> is there a way that a familiar "comment" box, or "add stuff here" box
> can be added to a page? A little like a very user-friendly guestbook,
> or a "comments" box on a blog.

While I can't think of a way of creating anything as direct as a
wide-open textarea, there are a few features you could exploit to make
things more inviting / obvious.

> * Discussion Tab - template?
> I notice wikipedia (and many other wikis) have a tab for the
> discussion area- is this simply a template within mediawiki, or a
> whole different thing? I couldnt find it in out of the box "skins"
> setting...

The discussion tab appears on every single article, right out of the
box. There's no way of *removing* it without carefully hacking up the
source code! All it does is link to a separate wiki page for holding
discussions on - it evolved out of the desire of Wikipedians to keep
the articles looking like articles, and have discussion associated
with but visually separate from each one. (More traditional wikis
consider discussion to be simply content that hasn't been fully
refactored yet, and treat the whole site as more of a collective
brainstorm than a collaborative development project.)

Note that if the discussion page has not been created yet, the link
will appear red, and go straight to an edit box to create it. If it
does exist, the link will take you to the existing discussion, which
you will then have to edit.

> * discussion inline?
> Also, can this discussion content be "inline" - eg after the meat of
> the page? the items they are discussing? Or always on another tab...
> it is hidden and doesnt motivate users to contribute "like others"

There's certainly nothing to stop you adding a "==Discussion==" header
at the bottom of every article - although as yet there is no way of
creating this automatically on new pages. The section could then be
editted individually (via the little link marked "[edit]") - I think
this usually only shows up for logged-in users, but that may be
alterable in the settings.

As well as editting existing sections on their own, there is a link on
discussion pages for adding a *new* section (somewhat hidden as a
little tab marked "+" in the default monobook skin). And by exploiting
the URL scheme for that, and a few magic variables (see
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Variable) you can add it to *any*
page, with something like:
* [{{SERVER}}{{localurl:{{NAMESPACE}}:{{PAGENAME}}|action=edit&section=new}}
Add a new section to this page.]

Don't worry, you don't have to type all that every time, you can use a
template (see http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Help:Template). For
instance, put the above in the page [[Template:newsectionlink]] and
you can add it to any page just by typing "{{newsectionlink}}"!

I know this doesn't really answer your question, but I'm just giving
some examples of how existing features can be exploited to get
something approaching what you're after.

> * "new page" button
> afaik, currently users have to edit a page, add an undefined link,
> save page, click link, edit new page.... very lengthy. Is there not
> just an "add new page" way to add stuff?

This seems to be an increasingly common request, and there is no
specific feature for this in the current software. As well as the
"orphan" problem you identify, making it too easy to create a new page
runs the risk of duplicate articles being created with similar names,
because people failed to search adequately; of course, this could also
be blamed on the software's search facility, and there have been some
promising experiments in this area recently.

One thing that comes close is to edit the interface message which
appears when you type a non-existent page into the search box and
click "Go" by editting [[MediaWiki:nogomatch]]. See
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/MediaWiki:Nogomatch for an example of
this.

-- 
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]