Well, let's be honest. Whatever the theories behind it, these are content
pages, they aren't mini-watchlists or really anything even all that
technically related to the watchlist wishlist. Content belongs in a
content space. Whether it gets its own wikispace, or it uses userspace, is
sort of irrelevant. (Actually a more pertinent question might be "why are
these being designed for Mobile?" When I looked at the test pages above
using a couple of different mobile phones and a tablet, they looked...well,
nowhere near as useful or interesting as they look on a desktop.)
Using the Special:namespace for content requires all kinds of jury-rigged
code to even to mimic normal functions like full-page deletion and
revision-deletion/suppression; in fact, as far as I know, project-level
administrators don't have the ability to delete pages in Special:namespace
at all. We've had plenty of experience with this issue: page-level
deletion is essentially impossible in several modules that have been
designed to operate away from the wikipage model (including Flow and AFT),
and the "alternative" to revision-deletion/suppression is pretty much
jury-rigged, unreliable, and...well, is essentially what is being proposed
for Extension:Gather too. In other words, from the perspective of someone
who is going to have to deal with these pages once they're created, they
don't work very well, and I can't do some of the things I ought to be able
to do with them, and no good explanation of why I shouldn't be able to
delete them outright or why I shouldn't be able to revision-delete/supress
things instead of making do with sort-of-similar tools that aren't written
robustly.
Special:namespace has pretty solidly always been the back room and/or
engine room of the project; take a look at the list of special pages, and
it's obvious that content-specific, user-specific pages do not belong in
the same classification as anything else that's there. It simply makes no
sense to put it there.
If it is absolutely necessary that properties specific to the
Special:namespace be made available to run Extension:Gather, then create a
new namespace with the same properties for Gather. If there is some really
good, obvious, well-documented reason why this extension absolutely needs
those special properties to be workable (and not "it's easier" or
"well,
maybe we can use this to build something else") then give its own namespace
that is devoted to user-generated or personalized "special" pages - but the
case hasn't really been made for it, and it creates a lot more work to
write robust code for deletion and revdelete/suppress that will operate on
those pages, when both of those are covered by well-written, robust,
heavily tested and used code now.
I would have thought that having to constantly write new extension-specific
code for these basic admin functions would have gotten tiresome for the
developers by now.
Risker/Anne
On 8 April 2015 at 13:58, Jon Robson <jdlrobson(a)gmail.com> wrote:
The main motivation for lists as not being wikipages
is so that they
can be combined with the recent changes feed and other things stored
in the database. We'll also hoping to support the filtering of
collections via tags which becomes much easier if stored in a
database. A watchlist is not a wikipage, so that in my eyes sets a
precedent.
We have plenty of options to surface edits to collections as items in
the recent changes if necessary.
It would be most helpful to articulate what the problems are, rather
than say "wikipages are the solution!" This might prove to be true but
without understanding the inadequacies of the current approach we
won't be able to pass that judgement.. so please test and provide that
feedback and we'll find the right solutions.
Thanks for your feedback thus far.
On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 8:52 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
I hope no 60 storey building is in the making.
The bazaar is horizontal,
a
vertical suk is too similar to a cathedral.
Nemo
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