Hi Jon -
These look interesting, and I'm sure some people will enjoy them a lot.
From my perspective as a oversighter and checkuser, as long as I'm able to
suppress information on the page, and the "edits" to the page show up in the contributions tables that are available for checkusers for review, I'm perfectly fine with these "pages". (Note - I've already thought of multiple reasons that we'd wind up needing to suppress information on these pages, not to mention half a dozen ways that the pages could be used inappropriately that could lead to checkusering -- just like any other page on Wikipedia. They don't need a different level of scrutiny, just the same level as everywhere else.) Admins being able to delete the page isn't enough, so please ensure that these are fully tested. I'll be happy to work with you on that.
On the other hand, I think it would be a net positive if everyone stops calling these pages "lists". Lists are a specific type of content that has existed on Wikipedia practically since its inception; projects have guidelines and sometimes even policies on their creation, use and format. Thousands of users have had their own personal lists in their userspace for pretty much the entire history of the project, too. Thus, the subject line of this thread is inaccurate: Lists have pretty much always been first class citizens on Wikipedia projects. This new extension does not create lists in the Wikipedia sense, it creates a collection of article thumbnails. Calling these new "pages" lists as well, even if just talking in the vernacular, will be confusing.
So...please give some further thought to what to call these pages that doesn't use a term that is already well-understood to mean something entirely different. From my perspective, the idea (and the execution) is fine.
RIsker/Anne
On 2 April 2015 at 18:19, Jon Robson jrobson@wikimedia.org wrote:
I am writing to invite you to preview and hopefully contribute to Gather [1], a new MediaWiki extension that allows users to create, share, and discover lists of articles. Gather is currently available for all users of the mobile site who have opted in to beta. This launch was primarily for the community to test it and to pardon the pun... gather... some data. We would love for you to try it out and share your feedback with us.
The best way to explain what Gather lists are is to contrast them with existing facilities for grouping articles: categories and list articles. Categories and list articles exist in subject namespaces, and their goal is to provide navigational links for articles whose subjects share some common, defining property. Gather lists have a similar goal of facilitating content discovery but differ in that they allow users the ability to group articles on the basis of any criterion, whether this be overtly subjective and irreverent ("articles I enjoy"); curated on the basis of cultivated tastes and informed opinions ("the most groundbreaking discoveries in chemistry"); educational at a more localised level ("Pages that Mr Robson's A-level chemistry students should read") or simply a personal todo list ("articles i want to edit/read today").
The Gather lists you create are currently your own [A] and you decide whether or not they are visible to others [B]. To see some example lists check out: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Gather/by/Jdlrobson/23 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Gather/by/Jdlrobson/35 https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Gather/by/Sonasonic/71
If you want to have a go at making your own lists you have two options (both require a mediawiki account):
- Opt in to mobile site beta:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:MobileOptions&retur... and then interact with the watchstar 2) Try it out on Vector [C]: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Jdlrobson/vector.js
To build this we have looked at the existing watchlist code, the Collections extension, the multiple lists in core RFC and the many feature requests around watchlist that span the lifetime of this project. Apologies in advance for lack of documentation, sometimes talking and back and forth over IRC/coffee is more productive then writing extensive documentation, but I promise you the team has been listening to all sorts of use cases.
As a result I think now we have the first essential building block - the ability for a user to store and access a structured public or private list.
We have APIs that will allow you to:
- create new lists that are private or public
- edit lists
- add and remove pages to those lists
- query lists
- moderators to hide troublesome lists
- manipulate the watchlist which has special handling to turn it into
a collection
Next up on the immediate roadmap for those that are interested:
- Fixing up API bugs, missing documentation
- Pagination was sorely missing from the first release. Code for that
has merged so that's coming soon.
- Polishing the existing user experience and working out how to port
that to desktop
- Improving on moderation tools
- The ability for multiple users to share and manage a list
- Combining the data inside a list with other data e.g. recent changes
to make multiple watchlists. I have a first version of this patch ready for review [3] and working towards the goal of public/private watchlists [4].
We have a long way to go and I guess this is the main reason I'm writing this mail - I'm hoping to collect more help from across our community.
If you are interested in helping feel free to reach out to me off list on irc (user jdlrobson) or poke around Phabricator [5].
Thanks for the read! Jon
[1] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Gather [2] http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/w/api.php?action=help&modules=editl... [3] https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/200181/ [4] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T9467 [5] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/tag/gather/
[A] In the future we would love to support collaborative editing of collections. Any one interested in helping? [B] ... Although currently the UI only supports public lists... API supports both. Help us build that out. [C] Highly experimental - this is still a WIP and may have lots of kinks. I would love a volunteer full time to help me with the desktop experience. It should be noted that the Gather extension works on desktop, but we've de-scoped the work there whilst UX standardisation is ongoing and to limit the workload so we can actually get things done quickly. There is currently a dependency on MobileFrontend for convenience but we hope to drop that very soon (https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T94100). [D] (albeit badly documented - patches welcomed!
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