A partial archive of https://discourse-mediawiki.wmflabs.org as of Saturday May 21, 2022.

Discussion extensions

Dennis

Hi everyone,

I am looking for a few extensions that offer the ability to add comments to the content. The standard mediawiki installation separates the comment/content pages which isn’t ideal. The extensions I found so far:

  1. Disqus - This one is pretty nice, it adds a comment section to the bottom of the page. Ideally I’d like to have the comments linked to a certain part of the content. Pretty much just like Microsoft Word, where you can add a comment to a certain part of the content.

  2. Hypothesis - This is a Google Chrome extension, this pretty much has everything that I want/need. I currently use this.

I want to make a comparison with as much extensions (internally/externally) as possible that offer a solution like the 2 above. Any suggestion is welcome! I will post the comparison results afterwards.

Thanks!

Dennis

samwilson

If it’s comments at the bottom of the page you’re after, something simple like transcluding the talk page can work well, such as is done in wikiversity:Template:Blog post comments. This has the advantage of users not having to register on a separate website (although, I realise that perhaps you’re after comments from people not registered on your site, and Disqus can work well for that, if you don’t mind the 3rd party tracking aspect of it).

For inline annotating, I’m not sure what the state of the art is. It might well be hypothes.is (which is available for other browsers too, I think, although perhaps not in as feature-rich a form as the Chrome extension).

Tgr

You are looking for annotation extensions basically, and I don’t think a decent one exists. In the long run, Hypothesis is probably the way to go: it is just as easy to load it from an extension as from a browser plugin, and it is a web standard.

Dennis

I agree, I love Hypothesis. There is one big issue though, also a big reason why I am looking for an alternative. The problem with Hypothesis is that it links the annotations to the hyperlink. But once you restore an older version of the page, the hyperlink changes and the annotations disappear. A solution to this problem would also be very helpful.

Dennis

Thank you Sam. Is that an extension? Or is it a function that comes with the standard installation of MediaWiki?

Tgr

Loading annotations from a different page is supposed to be possible, although that answer is annoyingly wage and and I didn’t find anything relevant in the publisher documentation.

samwilson

Not an extension, no; just a normal template that transcludes the current page’s talk page:

{{:{{TALKPAGENAME}}}}

with a bit of instructional/presentation stuff around it.

It’s also how the Wikipedia Signpost does comments (e.g.).

Elitre-WMF

http://www.wikicomment.ut.ee/ ?

qgil

The extension CommentStreams is mentioned in a conversation elsewhere.

CommentStreams is a commenting system for wikis. Users can post comments below the content on a wiki page.

Papuass

This one is quite capable, not sure how much it is used. When Ivo showed it to me it had only some hundred pages annotated.