Submissions:2016/WikiProject X: The development of the future of on-wiki project coordination, or: omg wtf contentmodels!

Title

Theme

tech

Type of submission

presentation

Author

Kim Schoonover

E-mail address

zhorishnagmail.com

Username

Isarra

Affiliation

WikiProject X

Abstract

Per last year: This presentation will focus on our work on WikiProject X, a project funded by a Wikimedia Foundation Individual Engagement Grant to research and improve the WikiProject experience on the English Wikipedia, where WikiProjects are community spaces dedicated to specific subjects or goals.

It's Happening. Before, we built a prototype for a structured WikiProject experience using wikitext, lua, and python scripts. It was kludgy, unstable, and incredibly difficult to set up and use, but our pilot projects put it to use and gave us invaluable feedback for moving forward. This year, we have renewed our grant to build a more scalable, maintainable version of the product not as an on-wiki project, but as a full-featured MediaWiki extension, and to redo the scripts so that they will complement any implementation, or none at all. In this presentation, I will present the future of on-wiki project coordination: CollaborationKit, a WikiProject extension that introduces two key new features to MediaWiki: Hubs, structured projects consolidating various features/subpages into self-maintaining mainpages (the WikiProjects); and Lists, user-created lists of articles that allow for neatly display subsets of the list for less overwhelming user consumption. We will go through how this works and is used, our development process, and what the future may yet hold, as well as the ContentHandler technology behind it all which effectively redefines what MediaWiki can do and be, and, as it turns out, was very difficult to figure out how to use because so very little else was using it.

Length of presentation

15-30 min.

Preferred room size

maybe larger?

Will you attend WikiConference North America if your submission is not accepted?

Maybe; my attendance will be determined not so much by whether or not my submissions are accepted, but budget.

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