On Sat, Sep 6, 2014 at 3:33 PM, Erik Moeller erik@wikimedia.org wrote:
As I wrote to Risker, I think it's worth considering spending some development time on turning something like the Teahouse gadget (which allows one click insertion of replies on the Teahouse Q/A page) into a Beta Feature after some further improvement, to see just how useful it could be for the common case. If there's an 80/20 rule and in 20% of cases it just gives up and edits the section, that might still be a time-saver and convenience. There might even be other relevant gadgets already in some languages/projects -- worth a closer look, for sure.
I'm talking about this with the Flow team, but I also want to be conscious of their focus and energy. One possibility is to contract this out to an individual dev to test out the boundaries of what can be done in JavaScript alone -- and make recommendations for any mediawiki/core changes that could help. Since a JS opt-in script can be quickly developed by anyone with talent and motivation there's really no barrier to trying this.
If anyone's reading feels they're qualified to take this on and would be interested doing it on a contract, drop me a line offlist. Obviously it's also a great opportunity for volunteer experimentation, as well. I think at this stage we should consider this a research effort.
There is some pre-existing work on this, beyond the Teahouse gadget.
- Mobile web has a very experimental "reply" feature on talk pages right now. It doesn't handle the indentation levels, as far as I can tell - it just inserts a new top-level comment. You can turn this on by 1) enabling beta, 2) enabling alpha, 3) logging in, 4) going to a talk page, 5) going to a section. That's a lot of steps, but since it's so experimental that's probably for the best :-)
- Gabriel Wicke has done some experimentation with this as well, and is looking if he can dig up the old code for me.
If others are aware of relevant hacks/gadgets/user srcipts, please let me know.
Erik