Re: [Wikitech-l] Actions and Special Pages

[H2G]

On Thu, Apr 7, 2011 at 19:39, Krinkle  wrote:
>
> Op 8 apr 2011, om 01:11 heeft MZMcBride het volgende geschreven:
> > I mostly agree with you, I think, but you seem to be side-stepping the
> > linking issue. The fact that it's currently quite ugly to make an
> > edit link
> > or a protect link is one of the biggest arguments in favor of using
> > Special
> > pages.
> >
> > Assuming all actions were standardized to use the ?action=
> > parameter, what
> > do you think about an {{#action:}} parser function? It would allow for
> > something like [[{{#action:move|Main Page}}]]. Does this seem
> > reasonable? If
> > so, I think a page on MediaWiki with some transition information and
> > a more
> > in-depth look at what's actually needed to get to a consistent state
> > would
> > be a good next step (assuming such a page doesn't exist already).
> > Thoughts?
> >
> > MZMcBride
>
> Indeed, the linking issue is one of the things action-parameters does
> not fix.
> But like you say, those could be solved in another way.
>
> I like the {{#action}} idea. I'm not sure [[ and ]] can or should
> still be needed though.
>
> --
> Krinkle

This reminds me of Bug 14892 (Allow external links in edit summary and
log reason):
https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=14892

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Actions and Special Pages

[Martijn Hoekstra]

Come to think of it, it is probably even cleaner not to have any
default action. &action=view is pretty clean IMO, cleaner than having
view as the only special case where no action or special page is
needed. Conceptually it is just another action.

On Sat, Apr 9, 2011 at 1:36 AM, Platonides  wrote:
> I also think it's cleaner to make move an action than edit a Special page.
>
>
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Re: [Wikitech-l] Actions and Special Pages

[Platonides]

I also think it's cleaner to make move an action than edit a Special page.


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Re: [Wikitech-l] Actions and Special Pages

[Krinkle]

Op 8 apr 2011, om 01:11 heeft MZMcBride het volgende geschreven:

> Krinkle wrote:
>> Op 5 apr 2011, om 10:31 heeft Bryan Tong Minh het volgende  
>> geschreven:
>>> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 4:41 AM, Daniel Friesen
>>>  wrote:
 Personally, I like tacking on ?action=edit and especially purge.  
 Prefixing
 Special:Edit/ doesn't sound nice to me. I know I fixed the issues  
 with
 things like Special:Movepage not  sharing the same UI tabs as the  
 rest of
 the actions.

>>> I'm +1 with you on this. I don't have any convincing arguments  
>>> against
>>> either way, but action links just look nicer to me.
>>
>> Without a doubt I'm +1 on this as well (either one of the other).
>
> I mostly agree with you, I think, but you seem to be side-stepping the
> linking issue. The fact that it's currently quite ugly to make an  
> edit link
> or a protect link is one of the biggest arguments in favor of using  
> Special
> pages.
>
> Assuming all actions were standardized to use the ?action=  
> parameter, what
> do you think about an {{#action:}} parser function? It would allow for
> something like [[{{#action:move|Main Page}}]]. Does this seem  
> reasonable? If
> so, I think a page on MediaWiki with some transition information and  
> a more
> in-depth look at what's actually needed to get to a consistent state  
> would
> be a good next step (assuming such a page doesn't exist already).  
> Thoughts?
>
> MZMcBride

Indeed, the linking issue is one of the things action-parameters does  
not fix.
But like you say, those could be solved in another way.

I like the {{#action}} idea. I'm not sure [[ and ]] can or should  
still be needed though.

--
Krinkle

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Actions and Special Pages

[MZMcBride]

Krinkle wrote:
> Op 5 apr 2011, om 10:31 heeft Bryan Tong Minh het volgende geschreven:
>> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 4:41 AM, Daniel Friesen
>>  wrote:
>>> Personally, I like tacking on ?action=edit and especially purge. Prefixing
>>> Special:Edit/ doesn't sound nice to me. I know I fixed the issues with
>>> things like Special:Movepage not  sharing the same UI tabs as the rest of
>>> the actions.
>>> 
>> I'm +1 with you on this. I don't have any convincing arguments against
>> either way, but action links just look nicer to me.
> 
> Without a doubt I'm +1 on this as well (either one of the other).

I mostly agree with you, I think, but you seem to be side-stepping the
linking issue. The fact that it's currently quite ugly to make an edit link
or a protect link is one of the biggest arguments in favor of using Special
pages.

Assuming all actions were standardized to use the ?action= parameter, what
do you think about an {{#action:}} parser function? It would allow for
something like [[{{#action:move|Main Page}}]]. Does this seem reasonable? If
so, I think a page on MediaWiki with some transition information and a more
in-depth look at what's actually needed to get to a consistent state would
be a good next step (assuming such a page doesn't exist already). Thoughts?

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikitech-l] Actions and Special Pages

[Krinkle]

Op 5 apr 2011, om 10:31 heeft Bryan Tong Minh het volgende geschreven:

> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 4:41 AM, Daniel Friesen
>  wrote:
>> Personally, I like tacking on ?action=edit and especially purge.
>> Prefixing Special:Edit/ doesn't sound nice to me.
>> I know I fixed the issues with things like Special:Movepage not  
>> sharing
>> the same UI tabs as the rest of the actions.
>>
> I'm +1 with you on this. I don't have any convincing arguments against
> either way, but action links just look nicer to me.

Without a doubt I'm +1 on this as well (either one of the other).

I'm in favour of action=.

* Easier to append to a url (like Daniel mentioned)

* "title" will actually be the title of the article and not of the  
special page
  (imho an important point, especially for gadgets. I dont even wanna  
remember
how I had to solve the problem to use css/js on a particular 'title'  
and had to extract
it from page name and split by slash for it to apply to MovePage as  
well. brrr)

* wgActionPaths are cool
- /wiki/edit/Foo
  /wiki/Special:Move/Foo ?
eh... no.

* because the action parameter is one of the oldest parameters
  around (feelin' nostaligic anyone ?)

* SpecialPages (imho) are not supposed to be bound to 1 title in  
particular (unlike
MovePage and Undelete currently do).

Just my 2cents,

--
Krinkle

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Actions and Special Pages

[Happy-melon]

"Bryan Tong Minh"  wrote in message 
news:BANLkTimhwb5EZR=5tpwsh8m34c4gvgx...@mail.gmail.com...
> On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 4:41 AM, Daniel Friesen
>  wrote:
>> Personally, I like tacking on ?action=edit and especially purge.
>> Prefixing Special:Edit/ doesn't sound nice to me.
>> I know I fixed the issues with things like Special:Movepage not sharing
>> the same UI tabs as the rest of the actions.
>>
> I'm +1 with you on this. I don't have any convincing arguments against
> either way, but action links just look nicer to me.
>
>
> Bryan

I agree that there aren't really killer arguments in either direction.  But 
I *would* say that consistency is a virtue we should strive towards.  I want 
*either* Special:Move/Foo and Special:Edit/Foo, *or* Foo&action=edit and 
Foo&action=move.  There really is no justification for that discrepancy 
apart from "it's always been that way"... and that's what B/C is for.

--HM 



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Re: [Wikitech-l] Actions and Special Pages

[Bryan Tong Minh]

On Tue, Apr 5, 2011 at 4:41 AM, Daniel Friesen
 wrote:
> Personally, I like tacking on ?action=edit and especially purge.
> Prefixing Special:Edit/ doesn't sound nice to me.
> I know I fixed the issues with things like Special:Movepage not sharing
> the same UI tabs as the rest of the actions.
>
I'm +1 with you on this. I don't have any convincing arguments against
either way, but action links just look nicer to me.


Bryan

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Actions and Special Pages

[MZMcBride]

Daniel Friesen wrote:
> What "IS" so evil about actions? Besides the implementation details
> which are just that... something we can make better. In fact something
> we could potentially make work better than SpecialPages would in this
> context.
> Personally, I like tacking on ?action=edit and especially purge.
> Prefixing Special:Edit/ doesn't sound nice to me.
> I know I fixed the issues with things like Special:Movepage not sharing
> the same UI tabs as the rest of the actions.

I tack on purge/edit parameters fairly often as well. The biggest issue with
parameters versus Special pages is that one is easily internally linkable
currently (minus the pl_title restriction) and the other is not. There are
_countless_ uses of [{{fullurl:foo|action=edit}}
bar] right now which is unacceptably ugly. There needs to be a
cleaner syntax, particularly for edit links, but for most other actions as
well. Personally, I don't really care what syntax is chosen, it just needs
to be consistent.

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikitech-l] Actions and Special Pages

[Daniel Friesen]

On 11-04-04 08:12 PM, MZMcBride wrote:
> Aryeh Gregor wrote:
>> On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 9:28 AM, Happy-melon  wrote:
>>> If people think it would be
>>> better as a special page we'd make
>>> http://foo.example.com/w/index.php?title=Bar&action=edit a hard redirect to
>>> Special:Edit/Bar; that has the significant advantage of being able to be
>>> formed as an internal link.
>> I've always thought this was the best way to do things.  Be careful
>> about overusing short URLs, though -- the only reason robots don't
>> spider /w/index.php?title=Foo&action=edit right now is because it
>> starts with /w/ instead of /wiki/.
> I can't think of a reason that any of the Special namespace needs to be
> indexed. Most of it is already marked noindex in the meta tags, as far as I
> remember. Additional explicit exclusion in a robots.txt file is always a
> good idea, though. Some auto-generation of a robots.txt file might be nice
> (WordPress does this). It's easy enough to exclude based on the prefix
> "Special:", but it's the localizations that ruin everything.
>
> MZMcBride
I don't really think that's a good reason to preclude being able to 
create special page based content. Eg: A forum extension that uses 
special pages. Our own Special:Code, etc... if we chose to allow those 
to be indexed.

Side note, why don't we allow indexing of Allpages? That sounds like a 
sane way for Google to find all the pages on a small growing wiki that 
hasn't setup the best linking yet or generated an xml sitemap.


What "IS" so evil about actions? Besides the implementation details 
which are just that... something we can make better. In fact something 
we could potentially make work better than SpecialPages would in this 
context.
Personally, I like tacking on ?action=edit and especially purge. 
Prefixing Special:Edit/ doesn't sound nice to me.
I know I fixed the issues with things like Special:Movepage not sharing 
the same UI tabs as the rest of the actions.

~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]


-- 
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]


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Re: [Wikitech-l] Actions and Special Pages

[MZMcBride]

Aryeh Gregor wrote:
> On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 9:28 AM, Happy-melon  wrote:
>> If people think it would be
>> better as a special page we'd make
>> http://foo.example.com/w/index.php?title=Bar&action=edit a hard redirect to
>> Special:Edit/Bar; that has the significant advantage of being able to be
>> formed as an internal link.
> 
> I've always thought this was the best way to do things.  Be careful
> about overusing short URLs, though -- the only reason robots don't
> spider /w/index.php?title=Foo&action=edit right now is because it
> starts with /w/ instead of /wiki/.

I can't think of a reason that any of the Special namespace needs to be
indexed. Most of it is already marked noindex in the meta tags, as far as I
remember. Additional explicit exclusion in a robots.txt file is always a
good idea, though. Some auto-generation of a robots.txt file might be nice
(WordPress does this). It's easy enough to exclude based on the prefix
"Special:", but it's the localizations that ruin everything.

MZMcBride



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Re: [Wikitech-l] Actions and Special Pages

[Aryeh Gregor]

On Mon, Apr 4, 2011 at 9:28 AM, Happy-melon  wrote:
> If people think it would be
> better as a special page we'd make
> http://foo.example.com/w/index.php?title=Bar&action=edit a hard redirect to
> Special:Edit/Bar; that has the significant advantage of being able to be
> formed as an internal link.

I've always thought this was the best way to do things.  Be careful
about overusing short URLs, though -- the only reason robots don't
spider /w/index.php?title=Foo&action=edit right now is because it
starts with /w/ instead of /wiki/.

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Re: [Wikitech-l] Actions and Special Pages

[Tim Starling]

On 04/04/2011 11:28 PM, Happy-melon wrote:
> For either case in the backend I would think we'd want to create an
> ActionPage base class and an EditActionPage from that, which looks
> internally rather like a SpecialPage construct, might even subclass it.

We had this discussion in January. That's basically what I suggested, 
but there are some complications.



-- Tim Starling


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[Wikitech-l] Actions and Special Pages

[Happy-melon]

In the beginning, there was Article.php.  And the Article class had methods 
like Article::view(), Article::delete(), Article::protect(), etc.  And the 
fundamental codeflow of Mediawiki consisted of something along the lines of:

$article = new Article( $title );
$action = wfGetTheActionSomehow();
$article->$action();

Over time Article has grown and bloated to become our third largest class 
(after ZhConversion and Parser).  Several of its action methods have been 
spun out to separate files (EditPage.php, ProtectionForm.php and 
HistoryPage.php, among others).  It's long overdue that this process be 
carried through to its natural conclusion with all action methods spun out 
into some new structure.

There are essentially two competing possibilities for structuring this, and 
they reflect the two parallel systems we have for "doing things other than 
viewing" to a wiki.  One is action parameters, and the other is special 
pages.  We have action=edit, or Special:MovePage, for instance; they have a 
similar function but different structure.  We have action=delete to get rid 
of stuff, but then Special:Undelete to bring it back again. 
Special:Whatlinkshere and action=history are another pair of pages which 
have very similar principles (getting data that relates to a given page) but 
different implementations.

For either case in the backend I would think we'd want to create an 
ActionPage base class and an EditActionPage from that, which looks 
internally rather like a SpecialPage construct, might even subclass it.  I'd 
like to ask people's opinions about which they think would work better in 
the frontend for, say, editing or protecting.  If people think it would be 
better as a special page we'd make 
http://foo.example.com/w/index.php?title=Bar&action=edit a hard redirect to 
Special:Edit/Bar; that has the significant advantage of being able to be 
formed as an internal link.  Conversely if we'd like to keep it an action it 
would make sense to redirect Special:MovePage/Bar back to 
?title=Bar&action=move.  Or is something more exotic like 
[[Action:Edit/Bar]] a possibility?

Thoughts?

--HM 



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