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PageAssessments should specify WikiProjects as config variable
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Description

A better solution would be to make PageAssessments extension expose wikiprojects as wg config variables. I'm sure there will be a lot of usecases for it.

Feature summary:

Surfacing the WikiProject through wg config variables on PageAssessments.

Use case(s):

CentralNotice is a viable use case, though there are probably many others. It is unfortunately not possible to surface WikiProjects on enwiki or those with a similar setup, as the relevant wikiproject categories are on the talk page. And the mainspace categories are not organized enough to do something meaningful on this front without a list of hundreds or thousands of subcategories.

Benefits:

I think CentralNotice use could be of high utility in reaching out to particular interest areas and demographic groups, especially underrespresented ones. And I believe it has great potential for both virtual and in-person events, and potentially also for fundraising applications.

Event Timeline

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Pppery renamed this task from WikiProjects visible on PageAssessments to PageAssessments should specify WikiProjects as config variable.Sep 14 2024, 3:47 PM

Is there anything I can work on as a non-tech person, to help move this idea forward? Or are there meaningful subtasks, so that we can perhaps break it up into easier pieces?

I believe @jeremyb is going to take a shot at implementing this.

I guess the idea is to dynamically set i.e. wgWikiProjects? Because we definitely don't want to have to maintain a $wg variable. Creating new WikiProjects should not require developer intervention.

I still wonder about the performance impact versus benefits. What is setting wgWikiProjects – the server or the CentralNotice code? If the former, this will presumably get set for all users. Everything accessible via mw.config.get increases the size of the JS payload. if only a small percentage of those users are making use of the $wg variables, it may put into question whether it's really worth it. Remember that at scale, a tiny bit of JS is amplified times however many millions… this can mean huge data transfer rates at scale that result in real-world CO2 emissions, etc.

But I see Lego is endorsing this so I assume he's thought it through and deemed this not a problem :)