Submissions:2014/Using the Memento Mediawiki Extension to Avoid Spoilers


 * Title of the submission: Using the Memento Mediawiki Extension to Avoid Spoilers


 * Themes (Proposal Themes - Community, Tech, Outreach, GLAM, Education): Tech


 * Type of submission (Presentation Types - Panel, Workshop, Presentation, etc): Curated Talk


 * Author of the submission: Shawn M. Jones


 * E-mail address: sjone@cs.odu.edu


 * Username: Shawnmjones


 * US state or country of origin: Virginia


 * Affiliation, if any (organization, company etc.): Old Dominion University


 * Personal homepage or blog: http://ws-dl.blogspot.com


 * Abstract (at least 300 words to describe your proposal):

The rise in fan-based wikis allows fans to discuss TV shows and books in ways never before seen. Unfortunately, as fans, we have the problem of spoilers. Using a fan-based resource is wonderful for those who are current with their reading/watching, but it is frustrating for those who want to experience the suspense of reveals but have not caught up yet. Some sites have even added warnings to their pages to indicate the existence of spoilers, but these effectively tell visitors who are behind on their fiction consumption that the wiki cannot be used by them until they catch up.

RFC 7089, also known as Memento, provides a user the ability to choose a date and time in the past, then allows them to browse the web and see how it looked on that date. One of the great use cases of Memento is the avoidance of spoilers. Though Memento was original designed with the Internet Archive and other web archives in mind, these archives do not have all of the past versions of a page, subjecting fans to missing information they otherwise would have had access to, if all revisions of a page were available.

Jointly developed by Old Dominion University and Los Alamos National Laboratory, this is where the Memento MediaWiki Extension comes in. Allowing a user to browse past web pages is even more powerful in a wiki, because all revisions of a page are available, providing a more complete experience. This allows us, as fans, to purposefully miss information we don't want revealed yet. It also makes all of those spoiler warnings unnecessary. This curated talk will discuss the benefits of this extension for historical review, spoiler avoidance, and legal assistance. We will also discuss the performance of this extension, and will provide a demonstration of the Memento concept in action using our example MediaWiki install.


 * Length of presentation/talk (see Presentation Types for lengths of different presentation types): 15 Minutes


 * Will you attend WikiConference USA if your submission is not accepted?: Yes


 * Slides or further information (optional):
 * A recent blog post detailing this use case
 * Download page for this extension


 * Special request as to time of presentations: Any date/time is fine

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