C. Scott Ananian (he/him)
Anyone have any clever ideas on how to integrate ActivityPub and MediaWiki?
I'd like to see MW grow some sort of task-based "editing circle" user-list feature, to supplement WikiProjects. Pau had some nice UX drawn up for this once-upon-a-time. I wonder if we can leverage existing mechanism instead of creating something bespoke for MW.
Evan Prodromou
@cscott we have user's contributions. Just emit those as activities that can be followed. AP can be one way.
If you're serious about doing this, let's talk.
Brion Vibber :blobcatcoffee:
@evan @cscott would this expose people to new types of interactions? Will there be new avenues of harassment?
Would off-site federation features open up additional harassment features? How would you integrate this into the moderation tools already available to the user community?
Evan Prodromou
@brion @cscott so, it's a fair set of questions.
Your questions are thoughtful and empathetic.
We already have RSS and Atom feeds for user contributions, available for public review.
I was anticipating generating the same content in ActivityStreams 2.0 format, and then adding ActivityPub subscription.
Would it be unreasonable to build it as such, and let communities decide (TM) whether to enable it?
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia%3ASyndication?wprov=sfla1
Brion Vibber :blobcatcoffee:
@evan @cscott I do think it bears thinking about *what* events one wants to expose in some kind of social feature, what they look like, what people are expected to do with them and how they will react to them and with what tools.
I'd want to think about all those things long before choosing particular protocols came into the picture.
Evan Prodromou
@brion @cscott I was thinking how neat it would be to see my friends' Wikipedia edits. Like Foursquare for the mind! A little bit of serendipity in the day.
Evan Prodromou
@brion @cscott I think the harassment question could go either way.
Someone who wanted to do automated monitoring of a wiki editor would probably find using RSS or Atom easier than using AS2 (sorry @jasnell).
Would someone who wanted to manually monitor a wiki editor rather use Mastodon for real-ish time updates, or an RSS reader? I'm not sure.
AP subscribers can be blocked. They could require approval, as with Mastodon. RSS subscribers are slightly harder to block.
Evan Prodromou
@brion @cscott @jasnell now, if I were really going to work on my wishlist, an implementation of the client API of ActivityPub for reading, editing, updating, deleting, etc. would be delectable.
Evan Prodromou
"Anyone have any clever ideas on how to integrate ActivityPub and MediaWiki?" was what I saw.
User contributions <-> activity streams seems like a pretty natural mapping to me.
I cannot speak to the cleverness of the idea.
But point well taken. I will look more into Pau's previous work before I comment again.
Good luck Scott!
Brion Vibber :blobcatcoffee:
cool cool
but before you go into any of that let me ask you something:
is this feature (activitypub streams of user contributions) even what cscott asked for? first, ask questions about what the asked-for feature would look like.
C. Scott Ananian (he/him)
@evan @brion this isn't what I was thinking about, but a really interesting idea. How would you present the edit in context to make a compelling feed?
Evan Prodromou
Evan Prodromou
@cscott @brion wow, those sound like some good features.
I'm interested in the a11y issue. What do we do in the Web UI?
C. Scott Ananian (he/him)
C. Scott Ananian (he/him)
@evan @brion sorry, that's a bit flip. More usefully, I'm wondering how you distinguish "interesting" edits from "added a comma", how you might extract an "interesting" snippet from an edit that added multiple paragraphs, and whether you'd want to combine multiple edits to the same article to avoid spamming your friends as you edit and revise.
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