Extensions & MediaWiki & Wiki & Wikimedia robchurch on 28 Apr 2007 08:36 pm
Forthcoming features to look out for
We’ve got a lot of big features planned or being implemented which will add to the MediaWiki user experience, although some of them seem to have stalled, which is a shame.
Flagged Revisions
Also known as stable versions, this is being worked on under a contractor, with some volunteer aid, and is coming on quite well, from what I can gather. With a bit of luck, it can undergo the review process and perhaps be tested on a Wikipedia soon; I imagine the Germans are going to want the first pilot.
Single User Login
Not a lot mentioned on this front in a while; last I heard, Brion had completed some initial tests and estimated the number of conflicts, etc. that might occur when migrating user accounts across to the central authentication database. I’ve had a few users asking me about things like cross-wiki blocking, and cross-wiki permissions, and while these aren’t in the plans for square one, central authentication will make them easier, as well as opening up other possibilities.
LiquidThreads
Some sterling work from Dave McCabe during last year’s Summer of Code, which unfortunately appears to have been suspended, although he has been hired by Wikia, and there was talk of it being picked up again, which would be great. If that’s not the case, then I would suggest it would be well worth Wikimedia thinking about contracting someone to finish off development, as improve discussion features in MediaWiki would be damn useful.
Update: I’ve heard that there are talks in place between Wikia staff to have this work continued, and with luck, Dave’ll be the one finishing it.
Media Improvements
Tim Starling has done a huge chunk of work on the new image backend, in the form of a nice piece of storage middleware which handles requests to view, thumbnail, publish and remove media, etc. There’s also a lot of discussion over changes to the various media namespaces in preparation for a big overhaul to MediaWiki’s media handling, which, coupled with the work being done by this year’s Summer of Code student, ought to mean we have some nifty inline players and so forth within a year’s time.
Search Improvements
I’ve spotted some interesting-looking activities in the repository which look suspiciously like somebody’s about to make a whole bunch of improvements to MediaWiki’s Lucene Search extension and the backend daemon. Apache Lucene is a Java-based search engine, and we use it on the live sites, but searches could still do with some improvement, so perhaps we’re about to see some drastic new changes in that direction.
Next Generation
(Section removed in favour of later post)
Wikimania
Who knows what will be requested at Wikimania, where the development team can’t escape the hordes of users demanding autographs and bug fixes in equal measure? Who knows what next big thing might emerge from a five minute catch-up session?
5 Responses to “Forthcoming features to look out for”
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on 29 Apr 2007 at 1:20 pm 1.Joe said …
On the single User login: any idea if media wiki sites will be able to use openID any time soon?
I’ve been looking at the ultimate wiktionary and the Semantic wikipedia sites too. Any idea when those idea for structuring data might get incorporated?
Joe
on 29 Apr 2007 at 3:46 pm 2.robchurch said …
There’s an OpenID extension in Subversion (http://svn.wikimedia.org/svnroot/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/OpenID) developed by Evan Prodromou. I haven’t used it myself, but I have heard that others have got it working, and I presume Wikitravel use it.
I don’t know if there are plans to integrate the efforts of the Semantic MediaWiki and similar projects into the mainline code. Semantic MediaWiki itself is an extension, which we could install on a Wikimedia site if that site required it, although it’s not the most efficient extension in the world.
One problem with all these different approaches to semantic data is that users don’t see a clear use case for them, which makes it much less convincing as a worthwhile feature. “Semantic features” need to be broken down into clear task-oriented use cases with definite, perceivable benefits, otherwise our users aren’t going to touch them, and it’ll be an academic exercise.
on 29 Apr 2007 at 11:15 pm 3.David Gerard said …
Search that doesn’t suck? OH DEAR GOD YES PLEASE.
Silly question: why is the Lucene search not in the default Mediawiki tarball, which just uses the shitty-beyond-ht://dig MySQL search?
on 30 Apr 2007 at 12:14 am 4.robchurch said …
Well, one reason I can think of is that it requires quite a bit of setup; a lot of our third party users won’t be in a position to compile and run a Java-based search daemon on their servers.
It might be good if we could provide better documentation on the whole setup process for those who *are* interested, however.
on 30 Apr 2007 at 3:34 pm 5.David Gerard said …
“It might be good if we could provide better documentation on the whole setup process for those who *are* interested, however.”
That’d be fantastic. Particularly for corporate intranets, who will have no qualms about free-as-in-Java, but who do notice how badly the MySQL text search sucks. I know, I’ve had ‘em asking me about the text search at work. (I’m currently trying to inveighle a position where my group, and particularly me, run MediaWiki as the standard in-house wiki software for the whole company.)