Type of activity: Pre-scheduled session
Main topic: Handling wiki content beyond plaintext
The problem
Let's envision a new way to pull together resources from multiple WMF sources to tell a story.
Imagine T107595: [RFC] Multi-Content Revisions as a sort of backend backbone -- an article can contain a bunch of different chunks, with some of them perhaps being indirect pointers to other resources (images, maps, etc). What sort of structure do we need to tie these together and lay them out? What sort of resources can we build? What kind of stories can we tell?
This proposal is inspired by @TheDJ's https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_User_Interface/Concepts/Story_builder
Expected outcome
Envisioning some concrete steps or a strawman proposal for a "skeleton" format which would allow building a story from a collection of resources.
Current status of the discussion
See the link above. I'm submitting this partly from bookkeeping purposes, and to record a long-ish discussion @cscott and @TheDJ had on IRC. I envision this session at the dev summit tying together a number of related proposals; see "links" in the section below. So I'm not thinking of this as a top-level session so much as one component in a session which includes this and also the linked topics below.
I'm hoping that @TheDJ, in conversation with @Husky, can create an example of a multimedia story that could be part of our projects, using WMF resources. This concrete example can spur discussion in the linked proposals below about which tools/ideas are necessary to actually allow authoring a story like the prototype.
Links
- https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Wikimedia_User_Interface/Concepts/Story_builder
- T107595: [RFC] Multi-Content Revisions, T149532: Why Multi-Content-Revisions? Use cases and requirements. - an "article" is a collection of things, not a single chunk of wikitext
- T147604: Cross-functional support for rich media - a "story builder" is one way to integrate rich media into our articles---or build articles around rich media. The concrete story might inform a discussion of priorities for specific rich media tools we could develop.
- T90914: Provide semantic wiki-configurable styles for media display - a limited means of decoupling image display from markup; the "story" skeleton could be an alternate means to this end, and could use some of the concepts developed in T90914.
- T149554: What's next for Audio and Video ? - a discussion of what A/V capabilities are needed to build A/V-centric stories.
- T149547: Making articles more interesting with data visualizations - stories are a way to integrate data visualization and/or to construct "data-centric" articles.
- T148734: Moving associated content out of the wikitext, T149667: Build an article annotation service - some of the "skeleton" information needed to tie a story together might not be inline with the article, but represented as an annotation. The specific location references in the annotation standard might also be a means to refer to a specific *subset* of an image/article/etc.