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Archive the Negref extension
Open, Needs TriagePublicRequest

Description

Reason
Unmaintained for 10+ years, and unused (I think).

To-do list

  • This task
    • Add maintainers of that extension as subscribers to this task (if they have no apparent Phabricator account, notify them on-wiki or via email if possible and note it here).
    • Add Phabricator project <#ProjectX> as a tag for this task, and remove MediaWiki-extensions-Other as appropriate.
  • On-wiki documentation
    • Archive documentation on mediawiki.org (https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Negref): replace page contents with {{Archived extension|last revision id before archiving|task=T######}}; replace T###### with this task's number.
    • If documentation page was translatable, remove <translate>, visit Special:PageTranslation, and click "remove from translation" (if you don't have the translation administrator right, ask a user who does).
    • Update Wikidata item (https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:EntityPage/Q21677761) associated with documentation page
      • add statement Abandonware (Q281039) to instance of (P31) together with qualifier start time (P580) = the YYYY-MM-DD date that you decided to archive extension (generally per edit history)
      • add qualifier end time (P582) = the YYYY-MM-DD (same date as above) to instance of (P31) = MediaWiki extension (Q6805426)
  • Phabricator
    • Mark all Phabricator tasks for the extension either Declined or Invalid. Add a comment pointing to this task when doing so for reference.
    • Archive Phabricator project <#ProjectX> for the extension.
    • Edit Phabricator project <#ProjectX> description for the extension with a link to this ticket.
  • Translatewiki.net/translations
  • Configuration/tests/integrations/etc.
  • Repositories

Event Timeline

Negref looks to be like a prime example of a very lightweight extension that needs almost no maintenance whatsoever. Having it converted to extension registration might've been the only maintenance it needed (+the associated cleanup, i.e. introducing a Negref PHP class instead of having two global functions).

That said, the bigger question is probably: does anyone use it? According to WikiApiary (which, lo and behold, was actually up and accessible as of a few minutes ago) only three sites use(d) it; of these, only one (the Dragon Ball Encyclopedia) was accessible and it seems to suffer from many server load related issues (as per their sitenotice). A quick look at the main page's rendered HTML shows that the site is apparently using MediaWiki 1.23.4 (!) which is ancient and has been out of support for over 6 years (as per MW.org); so even if Negref would remain maintained, it doesn't seem likely that the DBE community would benefit much from it.

@ashley Negref used to be available on Wikia/Fandom, over a decade ago, but got disabled/removed before their MW 1.19 migration (though I don't think I ever found out why). It's a shame, because it was a quite useful extension that we made a lot of use of on the Yu-Gi-Oh! wiki.