(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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