TULIPS/2024-12-19

Welcome to our nineteenth TULIPS (Thursday Updates & Logs Improving Platform Software)! You can read the previous one if you haven't yet.

These posts will be made whenever we have enough development updates to make a post, usually on Thursdays. Because we are working on the MediaWiki 1.43 update, TULIPS will be released less frequently until the update is rolled out.

Live now

We are working on performance updates and preparing for 1.43!

• https://www.wiki.gg/t/extension now redirects to the extension-request form
• RANGER navboxes have gotten some significant updates. We also redid our versioning. Please note, any version number with a . in the number comes after any version number without a ., in particular we went from version 12 to version 1.1. From now on we'll stick to major-minor incrementing, just like DRUID.

WE DID THIS

WE DID THIS stands for "Wiki Editors Developed Inspired Designs That Have Interesting Screenshots." You can submit to WE DID THIS by writing in the channel #we-did-this in the wiki.gg Discord server!

• User:Diriector_Doc from the Brawlhalla Wiki showcased the "Seasonal" theme changes to coordinate with the theme of the ongoing battle pass! The theme currently follows the "Season 5-Classic: Galactic War" battle pass.
• User:HighJewElfKing from the South Park Archives shared the wiki's 9th Group Photo submission where the community can submit themselves as South Park avatars and the wiki team creates a group photo of all the participants! See this blog for more information.

SATELLITE summary

Thanks everyone for filling out the first-ever wiki.gg SATELLITE (Surveys As Tools to Enhance Little & Large Interactions Targeting Everyone)! We received 1119 responses. The prime factorization of 1119 is 3 * 373!

Ranking of features

Here is the order of features ranked by the community. Our development order will not be determined purely by this ranking, but it will definitely be informed by it. In particular, we will be prioritizing the interactive map editor over BARD, which is a change in our original plans!

1. Interactive map editor
2. Toggleable display options for logged-out users, such as max-width, font changes, etc
3. Polls on wiki frontpages
4. User profiles
5. BARD (GUI theme designer)
6. Achievements
7. More advanced edit counts
8. "bigtable" class
9. Discourse forums
10. Extension:Chart
11. More backronyms (not sure why this wasn't the highest-ranked option, but don't worry, Backronyms Always Cause Kith to Realize Our Names Yield Magnificent Syntax)
12. Ability to see ads while logged in

A couple notes:

• We think the demand for seeing ads while logged in is probably higher than this survey suggests, because mostly wiki admins want this functionality for previewing custom CSS
• Some people expressed a distaste for achievements in the free text sections. We totally respect this viewpoint, and when we get to the point of adding achievements we'll try and figure out some compromises. Certainly, we'll allow wikis to opt out of achievements, and showing achievements on your profile will be optional. Beyond that, we'll probably solicit achievements-specific feedback when we're closer to implementing them.
• User profiles and more advanced edit counts will likely happen around the same time, and soon.
• The "bigtable" class is also happening very soon, mostly because it's being written by Mr Pie 5 and not Alex or Elm.
• We did not expect the toggleable display options for logged-out users to be so popular, but many people mentioned in comments that they want to customize their local font size for accessibility in addition to this option receiving a high score. We'll probably look to implement this in mid-2025.
• Not listed here (oops) but also planned is to have a feature-rich spoiler extension.

Premium features

The questions we put here were an early smoke test to see what options we should explore. To be clear, we are not considering "paywalling" any features we currently offer; the exploration is to see if we should add premium/enterprise features that we don't currently offer and would never be able to offer for free (such as entirely removing ads from a wiki). If you are an IP owner interested in the features we asked about, please reach out to us (DMing River in Discord is ok) with more information about what you'd be interested in.

Common requests that already exist

There were a few common feature requests that people brought up which already exist! Therefore, we'd ask wiki admins to share the following information widely with your communities:

• Syntax highlighting already exists in the editor! Click the pencil icon to the left of "Advanced." With 1.43, though, we'll turn it on by default. (This will be a minor breaking change to some people who dislike syntax highlighting so we want to do it with the version upgrade.)
• We DO support the Visual Editor! Wiki admins can request that we enable it.
• You CAN request to make a wiki for a topic unrelated to video games!

Cool requests that we plan to do

• Someone requested the ability to resize table columns, the way you can in Excel or other spreadsheet editors. We think this is a fantastic idea and have added it to the roadmap for the bigtable class! It's a little complicated and no ETA (it'll probably be a later addition, not part of initial release) but we love this idea.
• We will make the Multimedia Viewer extension default with 1.43
• If the page Page exists, and the user visits Page/ (which doesn't exist), we'll redirect you to Page - we may look into doing some additional automatic redirects on inferred punctuation mistakes too. Again no ETA but we love the idea!
• We are definitely going to create some kind of user shortcuts extension. Planned name is CLIPPY'S (Cute Little Informative Pages Per Your Specification) (see I told you there would be more backronyms)
• Informing a user that the preview option exists if they save the same page 3 or more times within a short time frame (probably excluding admins)

Things we can't do

A couple people asked us to fix all the bugs in VisualEditor, trust us, if we could we would. VE is not going to be bugfree any time soon.

Lessons learned for next survey

• We'll definitely have more information about planned features available on a help page and link people to that if they want to learn more
• Likely, the next survey will not be anonymous (though of course you can lie about who you are if you want). A lot of people left no contact information but had feedback we'd totally follow up on if we could
  • At some point we'd like the survey to be embedded in the wiki instead of hosted on Google Forms, but that probably won't happen by the next one
• We'll also try to improve the flow so that you can more easily skip some sections that don't apply to you

Thank you!!!

Finally, thank you all SO much for filling out this survey. We got an overwhelming amount of positivity, and several of you wished us a nice day or week in the free text areas, which made me smile every time. You guys are what make this platform amazing, thank you so much for your dedication and care for wikis!! -River