wiki
Contents |
wiki may refer to:
- suggestions / discussion about the indiewebcamp wiki itself.
- page type: the wiki-page as type of page or content
- projects: specific wiki-projects related to indieweb wiki hosting
Page type
In addition to sequential / time-ordered posts, many in the IndieWebCamp community either want to or already host a wiki or wiki pages on their own personal site.
Wiki pages are typically editable and versioned with visible / easily accessible version history & browsable versions. Wiki pages are often also multi-authored and have a multi-platform interface (like any web-based content hosting solution).
- Tom Morris has his own wiki at http://wiki.tommorris.org/
-
Tantek Çelik has a wiki at http://tantek.pbworks.com
- Amber Case had her own wiki at http://caseorganic.com/wiki/
- ...
There are also various wiki hosting sites / silos.
Projects
IndieWebCamp projects related to wiki hosting/creation/editing:
- Federated Wiki
- as conceived/created/developed/launched at IndieWebCamp 2011
- MediaWiki
- Used by Tom Morris on wiki.tommorris.org.
See also wiki projects brainstorming.
Wiki Features We Use
At some unlikely point in the far future, we may decide to migrate the wiki off of MediaWiki. If this ever happens, we'll need to be sure whatever replaces it has roughly the same functionality that we use in MediaWiki. Below is a list to collect descriptions of MediaWiki features that we use. Feel free to add to it.
- Wiki-style editing - Click "edit" to view page source and "save" to save changes immediately. Conflicts are not merged automatically, and a message is shown if someone else has edited the page in the mean time.
- Wiki-style links - MediaWiki provides a syntax for quickly linking between wiki pages, e.g. [[events]].
- Nickname templates - We often use sparkline templates to display someone's photo and name in a line of text such as
Aaron Parecki. This is done by creating a template with the person's nickname and typing {{aaronpk}} in a line of text.
- Signature on edits - Sometimes we add a signature to lines using ~~~~ which is replaced by the logged-in user's signature and a timestamp.
- Content templates - Several pages (such as events and 2016/Guest_List) use templates to avoid duplicating complicated wiki markup on the page. The templates themselves are wiki pages and are editing by the community.
- IRC notifications - When wiki pages are edited, we get notifications in IRC describing the change.
- The ability to embed HTML in the wiki markup – needed e.g. to add microformats to events
- The ability to upload images, e.g. clicking "embed file" icon inserts wiki link with [[File:Example.jpg]]. Clicking that wiki link takes you to the form to upload the image.
Wiki Features We Need
Sometimes, MediaWiki does not have a good way to do what we want, so we have to hack around it.
- Hotlinked images - We often want to hotlink images to avoid uploading them to the wiki (which is only possible if the image can be CC0 licensed), but we also want to proxy the img src on the resulting page so that the site can be served over https even if the image is http
See also:
- mediawiki-customization for all the things we've had to do to make MediaWiki work for us.
Suggestions
See:
- wiki/redesign for latest work on broader design improvements
Suggestions and bug reports for improving the IndieWebCamp.com wiki. Please provide suggestions as github issues here:
Improve notifications
Improvements to the notification system with Echo. Makes most sense if we decide to do #34
Improve discussions with Flow
Right now, discussion either happen on IRC or on the article page itself. This might not scale well beyond a certain level of participants. Flow is an improvement to Talk pages and adds some structure to conversations.
Improve comprehension with link popups
With so many new terms to discover, it can sometimes be disorienting to open up dozens of tabs. Popups shows an excerpt from the link being hovered on, without taking away the context of the page.
Short URLs for the wiki
In the spirit of permashortlink we could setup UrlShortener on the wiki, possibly on a shorter url.
expand Join the Indieweb with icons etc like What is the IndieWeb
Per comment from @gRegorLove : Suggestion: a graphic for "Getting Started" on the homepage could be good - similar size as the heart icon on there. See discussion https://indiewebcamp.com/irc/2016-06-10#t1465582107200
I think this would be good for that entire section. We could even lay them out horizontally (as three icons with short text underneath each, side by side) rather than just another vertical layout, since less text is needed, and that matches what other "call to action" home page UIs have like http://habariproject.org/en/
Logins should use the person's authorization endpoint if specified
If the user has specified an authorization endpoint on their home page, the wiki should use that directly rather than letting indieauth.com handle it. This will change the wiki's use of indieauth.com to be only used for rel-me-auth handling.
If you've defined your own authorization endpoint then you will never hit indieauth.com when signing in.
Improve layout on mobile
Current layout looks very "desktop shrunk down" compared to wikipedia on mobile. The sidebar and header and footer need pinching to be legible/clickable, as do the event listings.
Prompt new users to create their user page with data from their h-card
When a user first signs in, the wiki can read their h-card from their website, and pre-populate a user page template. This would make it easier to get started and would avoid making new users learn MediaWiki syntax as their first step into the community.
(thanks for the suggestion @rikmendes)
Switch to https only
Switch the wiki to https only.
Rewrite image URLs to a proxy service
In order to switch the wiki to https only, we need to rewrite all hotlinked images to a URL that is served over https.
Additionally, it would be great to use something like https://github.com/aaronpk/ca3db which archives a snapshot of the image that is hotlinked so that if the URL disappears we can still show the image on the wiki.
wiki-login URLs with symbols like `/`, `?`, `&` and https-only
obfuscated wiki's userpage-title URLs, which containing symbols like /, ?, & and https-only (without redirect from http-counterpart) are being used as actual URLs on related services (like IRC)
leads to wrong URLs, henceforth 404s
example: http://indiewebcamp.com/User:Unicyclic.com_mal -> -> http://indiewebcamp.com/irc/2016-04-08#t1460112925864
possible solution?
# 10:41 aaronpk you can hide the default title on your user page and add your own # 10:42 aaronpk add
__NOTITLE__in the page then just use regular header syntax
Embed WebmentionDressing
See aaronpk/self#3
Incorporate WebmentionDressing
There's an "iframe ready" gist now (demo), and it's really easy to theme (I think).
tl;dr you just put this in an iframe and use your path as the URL hash (#IndieAuth, #2014/Online, etc.)
Improve date readibility
Currently the events page uses YYYY-MM-DD which has two problems. First, the year is first, so if you scan down the left edge you see only years which is not very useful. Second, there is month/day ambiguity between US and the rest of the world, so I'm not sure whether this is April 9th or September 4th.
Current: 2014-04-09 Desired: 09 April 2014
Add "remember me" checkbox to login screen
Used to be there...not sure what happened to it. Probably is actually part of the IndieAuth MediaWiki plugin
Update Mediawiki version
The current Mediawiki version 1.17 is quite out of date. Need to update to the current version. The main challenge will be making sure the plugins and skin is compatible.
Add a custom icon to the site
This will mean I can tell which tabs are indiewebcamp in Chrome, and have other benefits listed in the handy Icon page: http://indiewebcamp.com/icon
Better mobile editing support
Add or change the theme to have mobile support for editing.
- This means that on mobile view have a text box that is capable of being scrolled through that is not so wide that it forces the editor to scroll left and right across the screen. Use case: Ben Ward had trouble doing this during the morning of IndieWebCamp UK 2013.
Possible solution: Install and use this extension http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension%3aMobileDetect, to detect this skin (WP Touch)
Brainstorming
Ideas being iterated rather than a specific suggestion for improvement.
Categorize Pages
Problem statement: If we look at the this-week reports (e.g. 2016-07-29 this week) and summaries of wiki pages that have been edited, it's a long list and doesn't provide a lot of information about why any particular page is important / compared to any other page, or any other way of chunking / understanding the long list.
Thoughts:
- one possibility would be to present each page with an icon in front according to what "type" or "kind" of page it is.
- another possibility is to use such types/kinds to cluster the list of changed pages by type/kind, thus avoiding a need to repeat icons over and over
- either way we could also use the "page icon" or "emojicon" on each page in particular to provide an even more specific graphical hook/representation for easier/quicker understanding of what the pages were about
Approaches:
- Use MediaWiki "Category:" for coarse top level categorization.
- What categories?
- Develop adaptively as needed from looking at "this week" and seeing what patterns (sets of pages) emerge. E.g. from 2016-07-29 this week:
- 📆 event pages for Events + subpages (HWC events), and IWC events /YYYY/city|country
- project pages for specific projects e.g. ikiwiki, WordPress(/*), p3k, relmeauth, WhisperFollow, Monocle etc.
- "feature" building blocks (including types of content like album, multi-photo, travel, and UI features like search), other things from IndieMark
- "technology/plumbing" building blocks (like Webmention)
- people (User: pages)
- (anti-)patterns e.g. database-antipattern, js;dr
- silos (GitHub, Google Photos, etc.)
- companies (e.g. Google)
- services (e.g. SubToMe, web hosting, Bridgy, silo.pub)
- history (points of record, e.g. site-deaths, history, timeline, posts about, videos about etc.)
- technologies (in general, like Perl, other languages, frameworks)
- (re-)use rough coarse categories from IndieWebCamp 2014 Year in Review separate lists of pages.
- Develop adaptively as needed from looking at "this week" and seeing what patterns (sets of pages) emerge. E.g. from 2016-07-29 this week:
- Assign a generic icon (or emoji) for each top level category
- What categories?
- Use page-specific page icons or emojicons (both already use templates, so should be automatable) to to customize the icon shown for a page
Done
Suggestions that have been implemented.
