On 02/04/2015 08:59 PM, Nick Wilson (Quiddity) wrote:
> 2) queryable, perhaps from an API or some other
method, such that we could
> potentially build an extension which could aggregate comments by user or
> associated page (similar to Reddit, where you can see a user's comments
> from their user page).
Aggregating comments by user in the API is relevant to our interests, I
think. To the extent that is not currently possible (there appear to be
some limitations in our API support, e.g.
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T88753 ), we are interested in fixing
it at some point.
It is already possible to see Flow contributions as part of the
Contributions page
(
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Special:Contributions/Mattflaschen_%28WMF%29).
It is already possible to get all comments for a page from the API (in
fact, this is the default with view-topiclist. (Topics are paged for
performance reasons, so for long boards, you may have to iterate).
> In the future, we'd also like to be able to
assign
> high level 'topics' to wiki pages and be able to query for discussion
> threads related to these topics. Our wikis are backed by Semantic
> MediaWiki, so we were thinking of using semantic properties to help with
> the querying aspect if we built our own commenting system, but we're also
> investigating Flow to see how well it could meet these needs.
As Nick said, we have discussed this for our longer-term roadmap. Our
implementation would probably not use SMW. Whether Flow will support
SMW is also an open issue (we have at least one other interested wiki
that uses SMW).
> I'm not sure that the header area of the Flow
board is useful to us in the
> pursuit of our first use case, unfortunately. It sounds like that could be
> good if we were building a new wiki in which every single page was a Flow
> board, and the header area was the actual article itself. That would
> simulate a comment area beneath a wiki page. Unfortunately, we already have
> an existing wiki with content.
In our long-term roadmap, we have discussed integrating the Flow
comments into the main article.
I don't recommend the header approach you mentioned either. Among other
problems, tools that support pages (e.g. VisualEditor) will not be able
to work with it properly. (Even when we support VE for editing headers,
it will not be the same form of it as used for editing pages).
Matt Flaschen