Talk:Multi-Content Revisions

Basically I want to add a disclaimer like: "It's possible that in the future, information like categories may be moved into a separate slot, which could impact editing ratios differently than we see to date. This is entirely dependent on the use cases the community and developers work out."

Definitely; I dream of moving meta-data into a second slot, but I'm not sure how I'd characterise such ideas; "possible" might be a stretch, and certainly not "probable".

I don't mean to suggest that people should be waiting for categories to move to a slot, but that some other types of information might be assigned to a slot that could be like categories in that they are often added now with content as a single edit, and thus the move could mean that the edit ratio might change. I hope that's clearer.

I have rewritten the example. Let me know how you like it.

Thanks for that! My comment was really addressed to the section "How does MCR scale?" and more specifically about the possibility that it's possible in the future that data that otherwise might commonly be part of an edit to the wikitext might result in a separate edit adding said data to the specialized slot. That's what I was trying to leave open.

Even if the data is in a different slot, it can still be changed in the same edit - if we create UI for that. The storage layer supports atomic edits of multiple slots.

Even if we assume that slots are always edited separately, I can't think of a use case where previously, the data was typically changed together with wikitext. In my experience, even categories are typically edited separately from wikitext. But that's just my personal perception, I don't have any data about that.

Anyway, perhaps I should point out that "separate slot" doesn't have to mean "separate edit". Changing EditPage to allow categories to be changed at the same time as page content wouldn't be too hard. We don't currently have an easy way for extensions to achieve this, though, mostlöy because of the terrible state of EditPage.

Well, EditPage will get beaten into shape sooner or later, so I'm not worried about that. And if we talk about or even promote the notion that it's good for related data to go into multiple slots on the same edit, that would definitely cover my concerns. Thanks!

I think the Extension:PageProperties is highly relevant to this topic. It records page properties related to wiki pages (like alternate title, language, SEO metadata, etc.) to a dedicated slot (JSON content model) and the additional slot can also be navigated through the interface. Unfortunately there isn't yet an easy way to edit additional slots as they were the main slot (with a known content model), however this might be allowed by few (also if spread out among various files) edits of the Mediawiki code base.