[Wikia-l] Wikia's social tools - any chance to get these released to the general public?

Fri Feb 22 06:18:50 UTC 2008

Well, Wikia has actually released some of their extensions, and even 
contributed some of their improvements to extensions they've used made 
by other people.

Wikia was making plans to try and open things up. I remember something 
about plans to open a public SVN.
And we do have a volunteer server.
Unfortunately, that server still needs work because it's in no way ready 
for use. Actually, we can get into it, but access isn't configured 
correctly... So we can't edit anything to do with the site, we can't 
tweak configs, and even lost the database password.

But I wouldn't say it's 100% closed. Some of us have actually been able 
to look over some of the code.

But I believe that for the most part things aren't released because; 
They're too Wikia oriented and weren't coded in a portable way that can 
be removed and released anywhere else, they haven't fixed up all the 
security issues and don't want to release till the extension is secure 
for use (And that someone won't use the code to track down a security 
flaw and use it to harm Wikia), ^_^ And general issues about poor coding 
that would embarrass the devs if were made public, rofl...

Actually... Half the Wikia extensions that were created are missing 
licensing data and other general things you see in released extensions.

Though, for some things, you can honestly find developers who are eager 
to look at Wikia's features, and develop OSS extensions which deliver 
the same features and more, while being portable.
I myself have seen a number of Wikia features I feel like creating my 
own versions of, mostly because the ones in use are distasteful in 
certain aspects. I started on WikiVid awhile ago, and am thinking about 
creating a extension for actual Widgets (Not like the Gadgets which 
appear to be primarily a type of userscript, rather than tied to 
graphical parts in the skin) for my skin I'm building for Wiki-Tools' 
possible revival sometime after May. Of course, to cut down on JS 
that'll actually come along with a allinone.php similar to the purpose 
of Wikia's allinone.js that'll be released in GPL on it's own. As well 
as a jQuery extension for easy access to MediaWiki's API.
However, my issue has always been public interest and resources. I get 
so many ideas, that I end up starting them, getting a mass bulk of them 
done extremely quickly, then don't end up finishing them off because 
there is no-one around to give me motivation to finish and release it. 
Cause of that I have a wide range of half completed extensions. (WikiVid 
actually has about 90% of it's functionality complete. But I haven't had 
the motivation and resources combined at the same time to complete it yet).
As for my resources... I use a family computer on the weekdays, and my 
dad's on the Weekends. Both have XAMPP setup, however one uses 
subdomains of localhost, and the other uses paths, not only that, but my 
Portable drive space is limited, and it's in no way easy to sync a 
database. So there are some extensions I can only work on in one place. 
I only have $750 out of $1200 for a laptop I desperately need. And I 
can't get my own hosting space till May unless someone nicely shares a 
VM with me like JaeSharp used to.

~Daniel Friesen(Dantman) of:
-The Gaiapedia (http://gaia.wikia.com)
-Wikia ACG on Wikia.com (http://wikia.com/wiki/Wikia_ACG)
-and Wiki-Tools.com (http://wiki-tools.com)

Timothy J. Crowell wrote:
> Wikia's stuff is closed source and Wikia has never shown off any of
> their features with code, except web search, they opened up web search
> but not MediaWiki improvements, how illogical is that? Sorry if that
> was rude or something.
>
> When will the new skin be available to non-gaming-related wikis?
>
> Now for Wikia praise.
>
> I see that they are using the new skin discussed as the replacement
> for Quartz (hope it is, if not you know where to pull some design
> from), the new skin has both a MonoBook feel and an advanced feel,
> love it and I cannot wait for the skin to be rolled out to more wikis!
>
> -Timothy
>
> On Feb 19, 2008 10:33 AM, Jack Phoenix <wikia.jack at gmail.com> wrote:
>   
>> (cross-posted to wikia-l and wikia-tech-l, sorry for the spam bit ;-)
>>
>> The subject summarizes my question quite nicely...
>>
>> As some of you might know already, Halopedia, Wikia's Halo-themed wiki
>> (http://halo.wikia.com) was upgraded today - they got a cool new skin and
>> lots of fancy new features. The profile feature
>> (http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/Special:UpdateProfile) is very nice, and it
>> basically allows one user to have two userpages: normal at User:Your
>> username and the social one at User profile:Your username. Mine's at
>> http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/User_profile:Jack_Phoenix - I really like this
>> feature. :-)
>>
>> Needless to say, as a former active user on several discussion forum
>> (Invision Power Board/phpBB-based, mostly), I really liked the avatar
>> functionality, so it'd be cool to have UploadAvatar/RemoveAvatar extensions
>> released. Why? Well, firstly they are fun - something aimed for the
>> communities and not just admins. Sure, CheckUser
>> (http://mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:CheckUser) is one of the most useful
>> MediaWiki extensions, but you quite can't let every single user of your wiki
>> access it...well, you can, but that'd lead to a chaos. ;-)
>>
>> The official MediaWiki SVN
>> (http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/) is full of all
>> kinds of MediaWiki extensions - from simple parser hooks to complicated
>> special pages. But it totally lacks social tools, like the ones that Wikia
>> has created. The closest thing on MediaWiki's SVN repository is the Gadgets
>> extension (which, by the way, is enabled on Wikimedia wikis) - and that
>> requires admin privileges to add / create these gadgets, too.
>>
>> That being said, if Wikia would release the source code of these extensions,
>> it might not only profit wiki administrators and the MediaWiki
>> community/developers, but perhaps Wikia itself too. Who knows, perhaps some
>> developer with SVN commit access could optimize the code further and make it
>> faster, stabler...and of course, the internationalization (i18n) updates
>> happen at least once or twice a day - you'll get i18n support for all kinds
>> of fancy languages you never have even heard of, such as Amharic, Gujarati
>> and Pashto. Yes, those all are real language - just check
>> http://svn.wikimedia.org/viewvc/mediawiki/trunk/extensions/Gadgets/Gadgets.i18n.php?revision=31077&view=markup
>> for yourself.  <g>
>>
>> Wikia has really outdone theirselves with these tools - thanks to the New
>> York Team and the Poland Tech Team. You guys do amazing job!
>>
>> --
>> Jack Phoenix
>> http://www.wikia.com/wiki/User:Jack_Phoenix
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>>
>>
>>     
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