Automatic Forum updates to Meta and other wikis

,

(Translation below)

There is a possibility for us to update Meta with a feed of conversations happening on this Forum. It’s not quick or easy, but it is doable, if you think that would help facilitate the discussions happening on both platforms.

I’m not the tech expert here; looping in @Samwilson who is :wink: to share more, if this is of interest to people.

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Yes, the basics of a Discourse extension for MediaWiki are functional. It pulls data from Discourse and makes it available to Lua modules, so wikis can decide how it should be displayed. The extension needs a few more features, and security review and deployment to Wikimedia production.

It hasn’t had any real-world testing (WikiApiary suggests no installs exist), and so will need a bit of work. I’m happy to help with it (as a volunteer).

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こんにちは。metawikiとフォーラムの関係の事なので、このトピックに書かせてください。

フォーラムにサインインしたとき、metawikiにもログインしますが、フォーラムからログアウトしたときに、metawikiのログアウトはされないようです。同時にログアウトする方法はあるでしょうか :thinking:

他にふさわしいトピックがあれば、教えていただければ嬉しいです。

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That sounds great! I think this is not the most urgent but it is high priority if there is critical mass of adopters here in next weeks. For sure before making final decision in July.

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I might set up a demo wiki on Toolforge for the extension, to give an idea of what it can do.

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Wasn’t there some discussion somewhere (Phabricator?) about the possibility to connect Discourse updates with Echo notifications?

Yes, well remembered! The task seems to be T212676 Show Discourse notifications in Echo, and it was declined only because of Space not being continued. I think we could re-activate it if it’s felt to be a good feature.

Are there any other examples of external things being the source of Echo notifications?

[There should probably also be a Phabricator project for the Discourse extension, separate to the general #Discourse project (which has been archived).]

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I don’t think so. If you sign out on Wikipedia, you will be logged out here eventually, but for performance reasons your login status can’t be checked all the time, so it will take time (a day, I think?) for the logout to reach here.

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We should probably unarchive that project and make it a parent project for the extension via Herald.

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返信ありがとうございます。
私はプログラムなどに詳しくないため、mediawikiもこのフォーラムも探索中です。私が考えていたのは、「同時にログアウトする方法」ではなかったです。
私が誤解をしている、或いは誤解をさせてしまっていたら、ごめんなさい。

Given the importance of connecting the forum with the wikis, could one possibility be to find a contractor to develop this extension? After the community review, if this is consistent with its outcome.

I mean, it’s great of the extension can be developed by volunteers, but if there is more pressure to have this feature, it is unfair to put this pressure on volunteers. It doesn’t seem like a too complex project either? Although what do I know. :slightly_smiling_face:

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I know this is extremely well meant, but it may be mistaking what drives community motivation and enthusiasm vs unwelcome pressure.

We should use staff resources to ensure fast, friendly, effective review + implementation of community patches and pull requests.

We should promote and support “not too complex”, high-demand, cleanly defined technical work as ideal things for devs in our open community to take on. Especially tasks like this, related to an existing tool that thousands of community members have experience with (and thousand more open-source devs who might not have had a way to contribute to MW before)

You can still assign bounties or other recognition to a successful implementation, to indicate enthusiastic support. But trapping the development in a contract with a single person, that then gets obscured behind & contributes to a social “staff-community” divide, and adds a bottleneck, historically has not strengthened the community (or even been faster than the alternative). [and of course the current extension was built by Sam, driving home the point that the divide is unnecessary / in our minds :slight_smile: ]

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I fully support and agree with the opinion that we should cause the app Discourse to have some acceptance and usage as a genuine resource for the community. In my opinion, the other resources do not come close to matchning the usefulness, benefits and positive role of the app Discourse.

the only concern here is the possible encroachment of Wiki Harrier-HAwks who might encroach here. if you want to know what that is, go look them up under WikiFauna. don’t worry, you have WikiPrairie Dogs and WikiShepherds, who can help to deter the WikiHarrier-Hawks. :smiley:

@Samwilson do you have a roadmap of what needs to be done for the extension to be deployed?

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I think the main thing is to figure out what it should actually do! At the moment, based on what we talked about a few years ago for Space, it provides a Lua module for retrieving info at parse-time. It sounds like there might be more desire for things like notifications, so that’d be more development work. But the stuff so far seems to work fine.

I’ve installed it in a demonstration wiki, so if anyone wants to have a play with it feel free to edit anything:

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@Samwilson , I had no idea about this resource, or that it existed. i truly appreciate your posting this link here. please feel free to keep us posted, to provide additional links, or to let us know any other news, updates, projects, resources, links, or of course anything similar. thanks very much!

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So, should we just start working through the deployment checklist? Pragmatically, it’s easier to do that anyway while the extension has less functionality and is thus smaller; plus, feedback early, feedback often, and it’s hard to get feedback without actually deploying the thing.

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This reply to @Xeno_WMF is related to this discussion:

I’ll confess that I’m not tech-savvy, but I’m putting on my project management hat to ask: how are things going? What’s the current status and what kind of support/resource can we offer? @Tgr and @Samwilson

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