Community Tech/Project ideas

Below are some ideas for projects for the new WMF Community Tech team. This team is focused on meeting the needs of active Wikimedia editors. Feel free to add to the list.

See also the existing lists on our issue trackers:

• MediaWiki and Wikimedia open reports, by number of votes
• Long-standing "epic" bugs
• Issues by topic: phab:tag/wikisource/, phab:tag/commons/, phab:tag/wiktionary/, SWMT, ...

RefToolbar is a default gadget on the English Wikipedia. It adds a "cite" button to the WikiText editing toolbar for quick and easy addition of commonly used citation templates. It is probably the most common way that citations are added into Wikipedia. It also has an auto-fill feature that lets you create a full citation by just entering the ISBN, DOI, or PMID number. There is a new Citoid service that is being developed for the VisualEditor that will allow the same auto-fill capability based on raw URLs. Since Citoid is an API service, there is no reason it can't be added to the WikiText editor as well through RefToolbar.

Adding Citoid support to the wikitext editor is already planned. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 00:18, 12 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

@Whatamidoing (WMF): Do you know what team is going to be working on that? Collaboration? Kaldari (talk) 17:23, 12 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

I believe it's the VisualEditor team, per mw:Editing#VisualEditor team and phab:T94223. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 17:33, 12 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

Looks like the bug is currently unclaimed, but is being considered as a possible GSOC project for August. Specifically, the bug is about adding Citoid + TemplateData support to WikiEditor (unclear if this would include a citation template editing interface), which sounds like a larger project. My idea above is a quick hack just to add a Citoid lookup to the existing URL field in RefToolbar. RefToolbar already does API look-ups and has mappings for all the en.wiki citation templates, so this would be a smaller, short-term project. Kaldari (talk) 18:44, 12 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

Pre-re-organization, it was definitely the Editing team, whose main project was VisualEditor, but whose scope also included the wikitext editor and Cite.php.

If you just want a quick hack, then User:Salix alba had one a while ago (I don't know its status). Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 17:58, 14 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

Right now Reftoolbar is only available on English Wikipedia (although there is a very limited version on Malayalam Wikipedia). It has frequently been requested that it be turned into an extension so that other Wikipedias can also use it.

Creating good WikiProject portals is extremely tedious and time consuming. It requires deep knowledge of WikiText template syntax and how to interface with the numerous tools and bots that exist for WikiProject portal use. Using FormWizard (or a new custom script), a wizard interface could be created for building WikiProject portals which would dramatically simplify the process.

As part of WikiProject X I wrote a requirements document for a Project Builder. I hope to work on it sometime in the next couple of months. harej (talk) 19:16, 11 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

HotArticlesBot is a ToolLabs bot that creates lists of articles that have been frequently edited within the past few days (typically as a subscription service for WikiProjects). The lists are based on the articles belonging to a particular category or including a particular template. It would be nice if there was a public interface that anyone could use to configure the lists that HotArticlesBot generates (via OAuth). It would also be nice if it supported projects besides English Wikipedia.

wikiproject.json is a publicly editable configuration file that will be used by my scripts for per-project configurations. HotArticlesBot and other bots are welcome to use it to store configuration data. harej (talk) 19:17, 11 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

There have been some experiments around color-coded WikiText editing (including an English Wikipedia gadget and a working implementation in the Android app). This could be made into a real feature of the WikiEditor extension.

Magnus Manske has created dozens of useful community tools on Tool Labs. Many of these could be expanded, updated, or improved in various ways. Most of the code for his tools is publicly available on bitbucket.

On a small wiki, visiting any missing page or searching for a page not on the wiki should load up Reasonator in the local wiki language. For example, the Johann Sebastian Bach info page can and should be shown on all 272 wikis that don't have a J.S. Bach page. Global south!

There are probably at least a dozen PHP API frameworks for MediaWiki. Most of them are old and with limited features. It would be nice to have one feature-rich well-maintained PHP framework that people could use for a wide variety of projects, similar to pywikibot for Python.

There is a small Node.js framework for MediaWiki as well as a fair bit of JavaScript API code within the MobileFrontend extension. These could be used as the basis for building a robust JavaScript API framework for MediaWiki.

Cool, but needs more details. Is this for use by external clients (the first link), external web pages, or on wiki pages (the Mobilefrontend link)? If the last one, how does it relate to the mediawiki.api module? -- SPage (WMF) (talk) 21:29, 15 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

Take code at https://github.com/valhallasw/plagiabot and improve it:

• Better organization of the output (currently confusing and can be extremely long)
• Add interface for notifying editor that performed the copyvio (similar to PageTriage extension)
• Allow any WikiProject to subscribe

Talk to James Heilman User:Doc James / User:Eran about further ideas.

Create an easy to use interface for adding WikiProject assessment templates to articles. Would probably require some sort of JSON config page for listing the available templates. Would work similar to the WikiLove extension (which adds barnstars to talk pages). Kaldari (talk) 17:30, 19 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

It would be nice to give WikiProjects a historical overview of the number and quality of their articles. This would require keeping a record of this data in a dedicated database on Tool Labs. Should investigate coordinating with WP 1.0 bot.

Notes and bug-links collated at mw:Watchlist wishlist.

Either complete the development of the PronunciationRecording extension or create a new extension that automatically pronounces words based on IPA code.

The impending WikiProject directory on the English Wikipedia will generate lists of active contributors to both the project space (the WikiProject page, talk page, subpages) and the project scope (articles and talk pages tagged by the WikiProject). This presents an opportunity for a bot to use this information for invitations. harej (talk) 19:19, 11 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

Copyright on Commons is a topic that is at times, subject to abuse. Some images are left for long periods of time because people are afraid to tag them, and other times images are subject to the copyright whims of admins. It would be helpful if there were tools to both help detect possible violations (there are perhaps databases we can match things up against?) and a better method for screening images once detected.

There are now registration tools, but there are not necessarily tools to support conference development.

• The Wikimania programme committee utilizes a matrix to assess the committee's opinion on entries, however that matrix might be more challenging for some to manage. Might be helpful to either adapt these things to better use VE, or develop gadgets to help.
• Session evaluation tool - a method of collecting evaluations on sessions.

I suspect there are other tools that could be helpful for consistent conference tasks.

Recent reports by things like OTRS have gone outside the traditional wikicode based report mold. Is that something that other entities should be encouraged to do? If so, should there be tools to help them do that to lower the technical skills needed and timeload on more tech savvy volunteers involved in those groups? Especially if the methods they are using are similar each time.

Perhaps there is a better way to capture ideas from the community for things like this document and RFCs. They tend to be very "Meta-Wiki" community focused outcomes, and become a bit complicated at times for less tech-savvy people (which sometimes may defeat the purpose). Perhaps there are tools that can increase language and cross-wiki participation. There might also be lessons from the IdeaLab project that could be applied.

This is really an area, where I agree we could truly use 'community' tech. Delection discussion/Voting/RFC'ing is a core element of our community workflows, that is sorely unsupported by tools. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:17, 19 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

Setup an interface to send notifications via Echo to users for things typically sent via banners. Also allow user to signup for things like Signpost notifications.

Notify me when my name is mentioned or I receive a comment on meta in another project (Tell me on mediawiki that I was mentioned in meta).

To help address concerns about colors and readability.

To remove the burden of updating text and basic setup from operations. Allows for wider usage for groups like AffCom.

To remove the burden of updating text and basic setup from operations. Allows for wider usage for groups like AffCom.

A very common request is to hide some element of the UI, but everyone has their own little pet peeves. The problem summarizes basically as: "We have 10000 UI elements and you can probably for each of those elements find one or more users who would like to hide it. 10000 UI options don't scale". My idea would be to make a gadget that alla 'Adblock' would allow you to highlight an area. The area would show the CSS selector for that part of the page. It then asks you to confirm if you want to hide this part only for this page or for all pages. We would save the result to global.css. Then everyone can adapt their user experience to their hearts content on their own responsibility. Some libs that could help with this: https://vimeo.com/52055686 and https://selectorgadget-plus.appspot.com —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:14, 19 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

We need work queues. A system, that shows articles that are in a certain group, for a certain reason and that need to be '(pre)processed' in a certain way. The person who can crack the task of solving this in a generic enough and expandable enough way, usable for multiple wiki types, in a way that editors can build new queues themselves, will be my ULTIMATE hero. Inspiration: WikiGrok + NewPagePatrol + WikiHow dashboards, Wikipedia:Huggle and Wikipedia:STiki, etc. I consider this the key to our long term survival. —TheDJ (talk • contribs) 18:29, 19 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

And I saw this comment after I posted mine below about "Inventory pages". Agreed. Biosthmors (talk) 19:57, 19 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

Using the extensive collection of en:WP:TC (cleanup templates) we have in articles, I would like to see each Wikiproject have a dedicated page to show what tasks (and how many) can be done to articles within a WikiProject scope. (I would also like to see such a page for the entirety of each language Wikipedia.) I describe a version of this idea at Grants:IEG/Automated inventory pages for all WikiProjects. My inspiration for this idea is from http://www.wikihow.com/Special:CommunityDashboard Thank you. Biosthmors (talk) 19:56, 19 May 2015 (UTC) [reply ]

• Community Tech team