Meta discussions over community, Appreciation threads, GSoC wrapups,
Deployment threads, and orthogonal questions.
Lately wikitech-l seems to be almost void of one of the most important
categories of discussion I like to see here.
Discussions on adding new features to MediaWiki!
So, just like Sumana's "Appreciation thread" how about a little thread
dedicated to listing out things we'd like to see in MediaWiki or perhaps
would like to write ourselves.
Not really big things like VisualEditor, Wikidata, and Lua who have teams
of people within WMF working on them. But rather those other important
things a lot of us may want but always end up pushed to the side and
forgotten.
For me...
Before I list the small stuff here are 3 big projects right now I wish I
could work on but won't possibly have the time unless I find someone
willing to pay me enough to drop a normal job an dedicate my programming
time to writing things for MediaWiki:
- Gareth: It's not exactly a MediaWiki feature. But with the Gerrit
annoyances and talk about other review systems I've had a really good idea
how to do a review system right this time around. It would be nice to
spend a pile of time turning it into a system that we could actually use
for our code review.
- OAuth: Well not actually OAuth. After getting a full understanding of
this topic implementation of actual OAuth (1&2) looks like a dark
dead-end. Rather than OAuth I'd like to write a new auth standard that
learns from all the good things and the mistakes made in both versions of
OAuth and takes note of all the things we really need. And then implement
it into MediaWiki and write a series of server and client libraries/sdks
so it's also easier to pick up than either OAuth.
- Machine-Learning based Anti-spam: Wikipedia has bots like ClueBot NG
dealing with spam. It would be nice to have machine-learning based
anti-spam built into a MediaWiki extension with a nice intuitive user
interface usable outside of WMF so all wikis can have great anti-spam.
Now some old and forgotten code topics:
- 404 routing: I'd like us to get to the point where we can set
ErrorDocument 404 /w/index.php and MediaWiki will automatically start
doing short urls, outputting 404 pages for you, and acting as an implicit
thumbnail handler.
- Title rewrite: Aaaaincient topic... updating our handling of the page
table and titles in general so that the case, whitespace, and all the
stuff in a title that just get's normalized away is correctly remembered.
So that [[iPod]], even though it's the same as [[IPod]] will always
display as "iPod" even in lists outside of the page itself such as
Special:Allpages
- Password reset tokens: It's unbelievable but we are STILL using
temporary passwords instead of reset tokens. Naturally this is less usable
and also lowers the security of our password reset system.
- An abstract revision system. The way we shove configuration into i18n,
i18n into articles, scripts and stylesheets into articles, and extensions
go and do the same. All just to get proper revisioning of things. Is
horrible. Not to mention the extensions that don't and rely on our logging
system which makes it harder to revert things. With all this together I'd
like to see an abstract system that lets extensions have their own
revision system outside of page content for whatever they need to do.
----
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dantman/Code_Ideas
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dantman/Abstract_Revision_System
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dantman/Code_Ideas/PageLayouts
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dantman/Anti-spam_system
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Requests_for_comment/Entrypoint_Routing_and_404_handling
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/User:Dantman/CodeReviewSystem and
http://gareth-review.com/
--
~Daniel Friesen (Dantman, Nadir-Seen-Fire) [http://daniel.friesen.name]
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