User:Cyrius/MediaWiki extension ideas

Note: these are just some ideas that have popped into my head. I currently have no intention of implementing them, nor do I have any intention of bothering the developers to get them implemented for me. I just felt the need to write them down.

Hidden[edit]

The ability to collapse the standard table of contents has been desired for arbitrary blocks of text. It would be useful in the context of spoilers, and for question/answer sections in Wikibooks textbooks.

A possible syntax:

Arbitrary MediaWiki text

</hidden>

On page load, this would render similarly to:

Title [show]

When the [show] link is clicked, it would change to:

Title [hide]

Arbitrary MediaWiki text

Values for the default attribute are:

Hide: always hidden on page load
Show: always shown on page load
Auto: determined by a user pref

Comment[edit]

A common complaint about talk pages is the lack of structure. The problem with using a dedicated comment system is that it requires dedicated pages, and breaks the wiki editing model. This extension would allow for a comment structure without seriously affecting users' ability to edit the page as MediaWiki markup.

The actual syntax would not be edited by humans, but could look something like this:

The text of the comment.

</comment>

This would render as:

A comment

The text of the comment.

[Reply to this]

Where [Reply to this] is a link containing the commentid and the talk page name. Clicking the link would lead to a page similar to the current "Post a comment" page.

Indentation is handled automatically on parsing using the reply-to attribute. If the reply-to attribute is missing, the comment is assumed to have an indent level of zero. Comments generated by [Reply to this] are placed immediately after the last comment with the same reply-to value, or after the comment being replied to if there are no existing replies.

The "+" add a comment link would function as it does now, except the comment would be wrapped in the <comment> tags.