User:Sj/Design chats/Events

Reminder: This is a wiki! Edit and refactor at will.
Project
designing a new Events tool & platform for (editing) campaigns, built into MediaWiki. Including an Organizer Center for event planners, and support for registration, communication, dashboards, &c.
Team
Campaigns product team. Founded August 2021, currently dedicated to events. 8 staff, 4 community fellows + ambassadors
Chats
[New Events namespace?], [Migrating current event series]

Chats

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Structured discussions about specific design decisions, moved to their own page to allow adding certain features.

Should the first release use a new Events: namespace?

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Discussions
Meta (2022/03) – first proposed. Summarized comments:
I like current calendar templates [Cronos?], gather minimal info, would use simple forms, a way to allow private email for registration notifs.
Let people go to an event space to find events to register for. A canonical event page and discussion page would be nice.
How about structured data for events pages, rather than a new space? sounds like a separate namespace would be for only a subset of events. If you plan to add enough structured data that a new namespace makes sense, starting with the namespace may make it harder to implement
New namespace tend to fragment discovery + add confusion, add complexity to maintain, hang around forever even if unused. Is that the right first step?
Can part of this be retroactively added to past events?
Will this create two classes of events, one which gets namespace-level support and the more common event which stays as is? That could lead people to shoehorn their simple event into this [campaign] framework to get registration tools
Stated goals
  • Identify what is an event page;
  • Make them look uniformly different;
  • Support certain standard features (mockups: T304713), similar to <templatedata> in Template:.
  • Bonus if visitors see 'Event' in the title.
Can this be done with templates? Would this complement a regular wikipage about the same event?

Technicality

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  • Namespace maintenance : How would event pages be renamed, merged + split, deleted?
  • Namespace migration : What would happen when things are moved in and out of the namespace?
  • Page format : what would event-page wikitext look like?
  • Event data : what might the equivalent of <templatedata> be for events?

Devil's advocacy

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Stalking-horse alternatives to illustrate decision points.

  1. Cats + Yammer: Have a category for Events, applicable to any page (Ex: m:Category:Events). Have a template for events, which includes visual layout and infobox-style summary metadata. Have a Wikidata item for each event, providing a persistent ID. If no EventID is set, readers visiting a page in that category can match it to an existing event or create a new one. Events have a canonical landing page, while multiple wiki pages can reference the same ID, their talk pages are all by default redirected to Talk:Landing_page. Other tools like the organizer's dashboard are tied to the EventID, not a page name. Even if the pages are moved or removed, the wikidata about the event remains until someone explicitly removes it. [Note: this avoids churn when new pages are added to this cat; the cat and template remain a presentation-layer nicety for uniform experience]
  2. #17: Have a multilingual Events wiki, [[events:]]. Makes it more clear that events can exist outside of the language + wiki context where they were first conceived. Pages on other wikis link to the Event, which can now customize the entire site experience, including the nav + chrome. Special Events: now you can even turn on custom Special: pages. People from all wikis will be able to use this, not hinging on whether their local community decides to 'turn on' a feature. Some precedent for Wikimania and other large regional events w/ their own websites. (Alt: merge w/ Outreach somehow)

How would current event series work?

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Examples
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How would a new Events tool work with each of the following (systems, maintainers, communities of practice)?


design chats