Today's RFC meeting was regarding general priorities for the coming months (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Architecture_focus_2015).
One of the key issues discussed was the idea of widgets, which is a new approach to representing and editing bundles of content (such as an infobox or a graph).
We also talked about canonical formats, and whether content should be stored in wikitext and extracted out (like a more sophisticated version of https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:TextExtracts), or stored elsewhere (e.g. Wikidata) and assembled. Gabriel Wicke noted the importance of minimizing disruption for existing editors and tools, and Bryan Davis suggested this could limit the flexibility editors now have. This led us to discuss further what areas likely made sense to be generated. I.E. graphs and data tables, probably not prose (but Daniel Kinzler suggested possibly auto-generating prose if there was no human-written prose).
We talked about some approaches to backend storage. Timo Tijhof suggested allowing a page to be built from multiple blobs that reference each other.
We talked about some approaches to widgets like infoboxes and inline editing of templates more generally.
We also talked about testing coverage and code architecture guidelines.
Daniel Kinzler plans to update the document in response to feedback.
Matt Flaschen
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Minutes at https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2015/wikimedia-office.201...
Log at https://tools.wmflabs.org/meetbot/wikimedia-office/2015/wikimedia-office.201...