Forum:Extensions and Us.

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Opening Post

So a thought occurred to me during Forum:MTG Minutiae when we added the Scryfall extension. What other helpful extensions are we missing out on that we might wish to add to this wiki? The extension in question was prompted by a specific problem, sure, but are there some that are just generically beneficial to our wiki as it currently exists that we might wish to ask for? I forgot about this question, but other events in my life brought me back to this question today, so I took a quick perusal through the stable mediawiki extensions. I'm sure there are others I missed, but there are some here that are quite interesting still, that I think we should consider adding.

• Extension:SiteMetrics - Just a generically useful extension for admins and other interested parties to have access to, if they don't already.

• Extension:RatePage - I think this one has real potential to find pages that could use a lot of work from the perspective of our readers vs ones that they quite enjoy. One needs to account for biases, but I think there's some real use to this extension.

• Extension:Network - This is literally the perfect way to represent nonlinear stories. Try it! You can click on the nodes and it will take you to subpages. The only concern I have is for mobile. It's exactly what we should do if it works for mobile and we can add it.

• Extension:GoogleTranslate - This one's a bit tricky and we should talk to our foreign language partners over it. They do fantastic work, of course, and google translate absolutely doesn't convey the correct nuances and tone, even if it were to do a perfect translation, but there's just so many of our pages that don't have versions in various languages.

• Extension:HitCounters - To a certain extent this will only tell us what we already know, but in the short term there will absolutely be pages that get flurries of activity for specific reasons and tracking that will be very interesting. In addition, knowing precisely the page views we get each month will be helpful for all sorts of reasons.

• Extension:CiteThisPage - Not sure about this one, need to look more into the details. But giving details on how to cite wiki pages + the things we're citing might actually be useful?

• Extension:AJAXPoll - Let's just be honest, having a poll extension would be occasionally helpful. I prefer discussion, but some things really can be settled with just a poll. I'd also like to get some form of Kudos back, but that doesn't seem doable for these forums.

All in all, I think there's real potential here to improve the wiki in with these extensions, some of them in small ways, some massively, increasing the potential for reader feedback and our reach to people we don't normally interact with. Najawin ☎ 08:28, 26 January 2024 (UTC)

Discussion

On the most part, this is not possible. Fandom only lets wikis request a small number of extensions that they support. Most of these are listed at w:Help:Extensions and w:c:Help:Extensions (those listed only on the second page may not all be available to us). I've gone through these lists before and I don't think there are any that would be particuarly useful to us. As such, unless Fandom starts supporting some more extensions, I can't see many, if any, more being enabled here. Bongo50 ☎ 14:47, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

I can't comment on whether the latter is an exhaustive list, but the former decidedly isn't. It literally says "This is a non-comprehensive list". Or, rather, the latter plus the former, since the latter explicitly says that they don't use comments or SMW, which are present on some Fandom wikis. So we just can't know until we ask. But, yes, I am aware that all of these are non-standard. Najawin ☎ 20:15, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

These aren't exhaustive lists, but a lot of the extensions not listed on either aren't interesting. Scroll down Special:Version to see what I mean. The second list is the extensions that were available on Gamepedia before that merged with Fandom. Gamepedia tended to allow more freedom with extensions than Fandom, so that's where most of the interesting ones are found, even if it is missing a few that are available after merging with Fandom. As a rule, if you can find a wiki on Fandom with a given extension, than it may be available, and if you can't, it's almost certainly not. To go into a bit of detail on a few specific extensions, Extension:SiteMetrics and Extension:HitCounters have overlap with the admin-only Special:Analytics (which Fandom doesn't like admins sharing details of), so I can't see them enabling those. As far as I'm aware, Extension:AJAXPoll (or something similar) used to be available but no longer is. I don't know why. Bongo50 ☎ 21:42, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

HitCounters is a more robust version of a feature that existed as of, what, 2.5 years ago? (It used to be possible for any user to see the most popular pages, but the migration to UCP removed it.) It's possible they'd say no. But I don't think it's cut and dry. But at the end of the day if these aren't likely to work they aren't likely to work. Najawin ☎ 21:59, 27 January 2024 (UTC)

Speaking of. Najawin ☎ 04:54, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

I forgot about this. Here are some thoughts:

• Extension:SiteMetrics - this one requires Extension:SocialProfile which is an extension that I don't particuarly like as it has a lot of privacy considerations and replaces some existing features of MediaWiki which I feel is unecessary. I have access to some very rudimentry analytics through Google Analytics. A better solution might be nice at some point, but we can suffice for now.
• Extension:RatePage - this one is unmaintained so likely more trouble than it's worth. Extension:VoteNY seems to be a maintained alternative.
• Extension:Network - I feel that there are better options to achieve what you're trying to achieve, namely Extension:Diagrams which are there are plans to install at some point. Network only allows for the creation of graphs by the links between pages and I think that would quickly become very messy. Diagrams allows for arbitrary graphs and diagrams.
• Extension:GoogleTranslate - this one seems fine and I'd be happy to request it.
• Extension:HitCounters - this only provides a total count of page views per page. There is no way to break it down into time periods or get monthly counts as you suggests. Moreover, I'm not sure if it would even work with the caching we have. Extension:Analytics seems more promising but would require a maintence script to be run daily (due to caching) which the sysadmins may take issue with. It is also still in beta.
• Extension:CiteThisPage - this is a fun one and I'd be happy to request it from a technical perspective, but I'm not sure we need it.
• Extension:AJAXPoll - this one seems fine and I'd be happy to request it.

Bongo50 ☎ 14:55, 31 July 2024 (UTC)

Ah, to clarify: SiteMetrics and HitCounters were for gathering info prior to the fork, lmao. Might be nice to have post fork. But much less relevant now.

Re:Diagram/Networks - there are specific reasons I chose that one, mainly from a UI perspective, but the link to try it yourself has broken, alas. Regardless, if it's in the works it's in the works.

I agree that CiteThisPage is largely unnecessary, but it has come up before, so, yknow, ounce of prevention and all that. VoteNY seems like a fine alternative to RatePage, and I think it, GoogleTranslate and AJAXPoll would all be uncontroversially helpful for the wiki a reasonable portion of the time. But other editors might have thoughts as well. Najawin ☎ 16:43, 31 July 2024 (UTC)