Forum:Wishlists for wikimania

Unfortunately I wont be able to make it to wikimania. Thought it might be worth while collating our wishlist for future features so the lucky ones who are going can represent us. To kick off my wish list includes:


 * Non Wiki style discussion with message board structure as people often forget to sign, add a new headline or to reply using : to indent. It might also be better to disallowing editing other users discussion posts. Muffin 21:18, 20 June 2006 (UTC)
 * An option to force editors to use the preview button before saving the article. This would prevent thousands of minor edits that spam the history list because someone has not yet much experience with wiki markup -- Matthias 11:12, 1 July 2006 (UTC) This is an option in preferences I think,at least for first edit, maybe it should be turned on by default.
 * A 'pages visited this session link'. Now I an not necessarily editing every page I visit I notice I get lost and cant find stuff Ive alreadty seen quickly. The recent changes page used to be ok but I could do with the extra link now to keep track of my activity.Lifeartist 13:13, 2 July 2006 (UTC)
 * Software that would allow for a selection of pages  to print together
 * Software that would allow for a selection of pages to become a slide show for lecturing
 * Special page showing list of images not yet uploaded
 * Small scratchpad above edit box where you could put say a template name you were using a lot so that when you clicked it it inserted the text at the cursor.
 * On uncyclopedia we have a method for adding tabs to our interfaces, but it requires some geek skills. It's a javascript hack...  On my edit pages, for instance, I have a link to add a number of templates and so-forth.  This should be easy, but I'm not sure how to integrate it for best usability... Dawg 19:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

above by Lifeartist
 * RSS capability on Watch page. (We discussed this, particularly push methods that might be more efficient than an RSS feed, which may already exist) Dawg 19:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Ability to take links out of a number of pages at once. (eg a lot of my pages have 20th century as a link and I would like to unlink them all without going to each one individually.) (This could cause a lot of problems and could be done with a bot remotely.) Dawg 19:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Ability to send message to all active users at once. eg to congratulate them for their efforts at a particular milestone or to raise a particular point of style. Rather than just putting it on Community portal where they might not see it so regularly.
 * Some coding that attracts search engine bots. It seems that wikis are at a disadvantage in the ranking stakes? (There's no way to attract them, except linking. Network with people and get them to add links to your wiki, since it's much more effective than anything one can do server-side in meta information.  There was talk about adding semantic tagging to wikipedia articles, which would apply to this.) Dawg 19:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
 * Spellchecker before saving!!!!! (This will become irrelevant for users of Firefox in the near future. 2.0+ has automatic spellcheck in text areas) 19:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
 * To have a similar feature as ISBN MAGICNUMBER for ASIN {Video} and ISSN {Periodicals}
 * I would like to be able to clear my watch list and to be able to have the option to turn off the watch tick on the edit page.I see this is under my preferences now
 * Being able to double click on an edit page to save it, just as you can double click an article to go to edit screen. Graet time saver when workinfg on long articles on small screen.81.178.112.228 05:00, 25 June 2006 (UTC) (Alt-S will do the same thing and is less likely to be accidentally used.) Dawg 19:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
 * C-HTML(Comact HTML) version of pages for MediaWiki, to view with i-mode mobile phones, as it is very inconvenient or impossible to view the normal HTML pages from a normal Japanese mobile phone, and the server does not recognize them, as it seemingly does WAP browsers. Inyuki 07:55, 25 June 2006 (UTC)
 * Doubleclick to start editing with the cursor exactly at the place where the pointer was at the doubleclick. I believe this could speed up the work. Inyuki 07:55, 25 June 2006 (UTC) (I like this idea, but I don't know if it's possible to do with javascript.) Dawg 19:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)
 * To Think, what we could accomplish on the client's side to minimize server load and improve user experience. I have heard that, e.g., Gmail, does a lot of computing on the client's side. I think the user experience would become better by doing jobs at the user's machine. Inyuki 07:55, 25 June 2006 (UTC) (However, you cannot depend on the user's machine to do the work the same way. Therefore, google javascript is extremely complex to compensate for the browser the user is using.  It means developing it many times and the solution is less reliable.) Dawg 19:08, 9 August 2006 (UTC)

This is a great idea. Maybe others could add to this list and also mark ones they like of others suggestions - that way we can see which are the most popular -- sannse (talk) 15:50, 19 June 2006 (UTC)


 * Possibility to turn other users ”watch this page” feature on.

Need some more explanation on this one I think - what is it you want to be able to do? All users have a watchlist as long as they are logged in - it's not possible to turn it on for logged out users because IPs are so often unstable. Or is that not what you are asking for? -- sannse (talk) 09:52, 29 June 2006 (UTC)

Who is taking responsibility to pass this info on??Lifeartist 13:13, 2 July 2006 (UTC)


 * I will make sure that I take it to Wikimania. More views on the ideas will be a help, so we can see what is popular. -- sannse (talk) 17:56, 2 July 2006 (UTC)

Not a wishlist, but some possible topics for discussion at Wikimania: which policies should be enforced sitewide? Checklist/to-do for founders/admins on new wikis. How to promotion existing wikis and acquire new ones/new users. Best ways of reporting bugs. Site design and branding. Risks to the project. Angela (talk)
 * I would add to Angela's list maximising search engine listing (see other forum posts)Lifeartist 17:28, 4 July 2006 (UTC)


 * I'd like to understand intellectual property rights better -- GFDL, use of screen shots (as fair use?), etc. --CocoaZen 23:55, 27 July 2006 (UTC)
 * I look forward to meeting face-to-face with some of the people I've already met on-line. --CocoaZen 23:55, 27 July 2006 (UTC)

Sort of tag type thing
To be able to put a sort of tag thing (e.g. something like  ) after relatively short bits of texts, e.g. news headlines, short paragraphs, etc, which would have the effect of copying them to the article the tag links to within a subheading which links back to the orginal article (either creates the sub-heading or 'files' under the subheading if it's already there - might be most recent content at top or switchable to at end of previous content). Maybe there's ways of doing this that I don't know of yet(?), but have been doing this sort of manually for various stuff on Sustainable Community Action. Something like this could be useful to help seed short/ newish pages with content, and may be useful in a variety of circumstances where useful to put content on at least two pages e.g. News items relevant to a News page and a topic article, detailed and summary/ overview type articles, items useful for place and topic type articles, news relevant to several topic articles, etc, etc. A few examples at Good to be able to do this sort of thing from both ends of the linked pages. Philralph 13:35, 1 August 2006 (UTC)
 * sca21:News UK July 2006 - 'tags' appear as / pagename, at end of article or using links within the text
 * sca21:project:WikiNode - copied items appear under the heading 'related wiki' (or similar) on topic articles
 * sca21:Recent resources - 'tags' appear as first bit of text after bullet