I’ve learned, from listening to corporate users of MediaWiki, that watchlists are very important for maintaining the quality of the wiki.
The guys running the EVA wiki at NASA, for example, have done a lot of work on Watchlist Analytics extension to ensure that the articles on their wiki have watchers spread out over the entire wiki.
Installing this extension for a client increased their awareness of the usefulness of watchlists and, since they had been using WhoIsWatching in the past, they asked me to fix a problem they had encountered.
The client takes a little more proactive approach to managing their wiki. It might not seem like “the wiki way” to people who have only used MediaWiki on Wikipedia, but they wanted to use the ability of WhoIsWatching to put pages on editor’s watchlists.
In the past, when they used the page, it showed a list of users and allows those with permission to add the page to anyone’s watchlist. It limited the list to those people who had provided an email address, which made that more manageable.
Since then, I’ve implemented Single Sign On for them and auto-populated their email address from Active Directory. As a result, the number of users with an email address has jumped from a handful to over 10,000.
So, now WhoIsWatching was trying to load thousands of rows and display them all at once on a single page.
It was trying, but the requests were timing out and the page was un-usable.
The extension had other problems. It practiced security-through-obscurity. While you could disable the ability to add pages to other people’s watchlists, the only thing to keep the anyone from adding pages was the fact that its administrative page (or “Special Page” in MediaWiki parlance) was not on the list of special pages. If you knew about the page, you could visit it and add an article you were hard at work on to everyone’s watchlists, thus spamming them with notifications from the wiki of all your changes.
That, and if you visited the special page without providing any arguments, you’d get a cryptic “usage” message.
To address the first problem, I decided to put an auto-complete form on the page so that a user could start typing a username and then MediaWiki would provide a list of matching usernames. I wondered how I would do this until I noticed that the Special:UserRights page was now providing this sort of auto-completion. Adding that functionality was as easy as providing an text field with the class mw-autocomplete-user.
I addressed the security issue by adding a couple of rights that could be given to users through the user interface (instead of by updating the value of global variables in a php file).
Finally, the frosting on the cake was to make WhoIsWatching’s special page useful if you visited it all by itself.
I already knew that the search bar provided auto-completion for article names and, based on what I discovered with mw-autocomplete-user, I thought I might be able to do something similar with page completion.
I was right. Thanks to a bug in a minor skin discovered back in 2012, you can add the class mw-search-input to a text field and works.
I haven’t been aware of all the great auto-completion work that MediaWiki developers like krinkle and MetaMax have been doing, but I’m pleased with what I see. And the improvments that they implemented made adding the features I needed to WhoIsWatching about a thousand percent easier.
Oh, and I did miscellaneous code cleanup and i18n wrangling (with Siebrand’s guidance, naturally). Now many changes sit ready for review.
There are still things I’d like to fix, but those will have to wait.
Image credit: Livrustkammaren (The Royal Armoury) / Erik Lernestål / CC BY-SA [CC BY-SA 3.0 or Public domain], via Wikimedia Commons
