On Wed, Apr 8, 2015 at 12:17 PM, Brian Wolff <bawolff(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Apr 8, 2015 2:59 PM, "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.
To be nitpicky, not only is it possible to combine rc with wikipages, its
been supported (and mostly unused) for ages in the form of
special:recentchangeslinked. More structured lists could be done with
content handler (as with all things there are pros and cons to such an
approach).
but this wouldn't scale for a Watchlist view - which basically does a
JOIN on recent changes with the items in that collection.
The experimental
http://en.wikipedia.beta.wmflabs.org/wiki/Special:GatherEditFeed which
provides a multiple watchlist type feature is only possible because it
is done in a database. If you believe there is a way to do that, I'd
love to see a prototype from you proving me wrong :-).
We'll also hoping to support the filtering
of
collections via tags which becomes much easier if stored in a
database.
"Tags" is another jargon quaigmire in mw land....
Anyways no particular reason why stuff can't be canonically on a wikipage
and extracted to db tables (in a similar fashion to link tables). Doing
that gives you history, reverting, oversight, collaborative editing, talk
pages, etc for free. (But of course im sure that has its own drawbacks)
[Also its important to keep in mind: it is easy to wax poetic on the
mailing list about how something ought to be done, much harder to actually
do it. So take my comment with the salt appropriate of somebody who hasn't
implemented anything nor has any plans to]
A watchlist is not a wikipage, so that in my eyes
sets a
precedent.
Its also unequivocally private. I think a lot of the conflict here comes
from the dual nature of gather as public/private.
True, but given we as a community apparently want truely public
watchlists it's time to work out what that looks like :)
I think a closer precedent would be abuse filters, but the system for
editing such things is probably much less popular than watchlists.
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.
I think the problem is one of integration. People want anything publically
editable to be consistent. Earlier in this thread TheDJ made a comparison
to building an office tower with duct tape. Well he has a fair point about
hacky solutions, to extend the metaphor, nobody wants an office tower built
of fifty different materials either, they want a unified building that
looks integrated and consistent. Using wiki pages gives integration with
all current site features and any future site feautres which don't exist
yet, for free.
Agreed, this is definitely an integration problem. I'd like us to
generalise our existing site features and make them less like duct
tape. There is very little code abstraction which has traditionally
made this difficult. I think when we say "this should be a wiki page"
we actually mean something different - in that what we are really
saying is "this should integrate with recent changes" or this should
integrate with X. Identifying those problems will move us forward as
we will find solutions to them and build better software. Starting
with "it should be a wikipage" is approaching the problem from the
wrong direction. This may turn out to be the solution but it's not a
good way to write software efficiently.
Thanks for your feedback thus far.
I appreciate that you are taking the feedback in stride. Some of it has
been quite harsh, and if it was me, I would probably be pretty defensive at
this point.
I truly do want to build the right thing and I really do believe what
we have built so far is well architected (but not perfect). I really
do encourage you to identify the gaping holes in this infrastructure
so these conversations can become actionable and we can go beyond the
wikipage.
--bawolff
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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