https://bugzilla.wikimedia.org/show_bug.cgi?id=20678
Summary: List of essential features for AJAXCategories
Product: mwEmbed
Version: unspecified
Platform: All
OS/Version: All
Status: NEW
Severity: enhancement
Priority: Normal
Component: General/Unknown
AssignedTo: d...@ucsc.edu
ReportedBy: lupo.bugzi...@gmail.com
CC: agarr...@wikimedia.org
First off, I know this AJAXCategories feature only from this mailing list
discussion:
http://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2009-September/045203.html
Glad to see that HotCat is on its way to make into the standard MediaWiki.
I glanced over the JavaScript code, and it seems to me that compared to the
currently active HotCat versions at the English Wikipedia and at the Commons
(that's two different versions!), this new implementation is missing several
essential features:
- Changing an existing category. Maybe I overlooked it, but I only see support
for adding and deleting categories as two separate operations.
- I didn't look at the suggestion code in depth. Just a question: does it do
the replace-and autoselect stuff HotCat currently does? (It places the first
suggestion, if the user's input is still a prefix match, into the input box and
selects the new suffix such that it is overwritten if the user keeps typing.
Kind of an auto-completion feature.)
- Does/can it automatically resolve hard and soft category redirects? (HotCat
does. Might be difficult to do in a general library since different wikis may
have different ways to do soft redirects. If it can't be done in your core
code, please provide easy hooks where people can plug-in a resolution mechanism
(which might make an API call itself, so prepare for continuations). In any
case, this feature is essential enough at the Commons that a replacement for
HotCat would need to provide it.)
- Does/can it automatically handle disambiguation categories? (Same comment as
for redirects applies).
- Does/Can it automatically remove {{uncategorized}} templates? (Same comment
as for redirects applies).
- Does/Can it omit handling of transcluded categories? (HotCat doesn't do that
currently. Either would need to get the page text up front and check which
categories occur directly in the text, or a server-side change that would mark
transcluded categories in the served (X)HTML, maybe using a class.)
- In HotCat, users can temporarily switch off auto-saving by ctrl-clicking.
- The HotCat at the English Wikipedia tries to figure out the right place to
add new categories. Basically, where there already are categories. Just
appending at the end may lead to a cluttered wikitext with intermingled
categories and interwiki links.
- At the Commons, HotCat ties into the upload form.
- Confirmation dialogs should be optional; at least logged-in users should have
the ability to switch them off.
- Edit summaries need not be localizeable to wgUserLanguage, it's sufficient if
they are always in the wgContentLanguage of the wiki. An Arabic edit summary at
the English Wikipedia is utterly useless to most contributors there (as only a
few can read Arabic). Edit summaries are first and foremost for the benefit of
the other editors at a wiki, not for the editor making the edit.
- It also seems to me that the current implementation makes three requests for
each category change (without the suggestions): one to get the page and the
edit token, a second one to save, and a third one loading the page again to
refresh the category list. Isn't this last request unnecessary? It is known
which category was added/deleted/changed and how, so the DOM could be adapted
accordingly on the client side without reloading the page.
- If HotCat is to be replaced/reimplemented, finally implement
adding/changing/deleting several categories at once. Otherwise, there's no real
gain. Just reimplementing working code because the new code might look nicer
is, IMO, not enough reason to do it. HotCat is pretty much self-contained and
works well, so there is no pressing need to refactor it unless there is
functionality it cannot do without a refactoring. (Of course, one reason to
refactor is also to include it in the standard distribution. But then it should
at least provide all that the current solution provides.)
- It would also be nice if a re-implementation of HotCat offered the ability to
browse the category tree besides its prefix-based auto-suggestions.
- What's the status of bug 19586? Should IMO be resolved before jQuery is
deployed globally.
- What about IE ActiveX alerts? Currently, HotCat is a gadget to be enabled
explicitly by a user, so that's tolerable. But if this jQuery-reimplementation
of HotCat is enabled for everyone by default, it must not cause spurious "Do
you want to allow ActiveX execution"-alerts for IE users.
I hope you find at least some of these comments useful.
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