Topic on Extension talk:Gather

I loved the Wikipedia collections tool when I first found it.

But that was on my tablet, and I never could figure out how to access them from a desktop environment. Perhaps it was implemented in desktop, but I never looked again or found it.

Perhaps keep this alive? What is the data involved? This is all CC licensed so content could still be hosted from another open source project? What would be involved in transferring the data or maintaining this feature from an external project?

Depending on the scope..would be interested in helping to keep this alive..

PS there could be value in keeping track of which folder names map to what sets of articles...

Hi @Thejmazz.

It is being disabled on english wikipedia because of an Rfc raised by some community members because of concerns about the software: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(proposals)#RfC:_Disable_Gather_on_enwiki

The data is stored on the wiki database, and it is not being deleted, so in the future if the extension is enabled again the data would be there.

The project is Gather (extension), a mediawiki extension. There are links and info about it's development on those pages, you are welcome to have a look and contribute (phabricator board).

Cheers and thanks for chiming in.

Hi, JHernandez. I noticed the message of collection being discontinued today. It said the deadline was March 1st, but I filled the form anyway. Not surprisingly, I haven't received anything. Is there no way for me to access the lists I created anymore? :'(

I received the link to my collections. I can see them now. Thank you.

It was a fantastic and novel idea. Before it was announced, I was working on my own JavaScript version of "custom watchlists". Then WMF came along and made a much more kick-ass version of it. Then they took it away! It's true the watchlist aspect was far short of complete but it seemed very promising. I hope this project will one day be revived. Many thanks to the Gather team for their efforts, and sorry it didn't work out :(

@MusikAnimal there is talk of reviving this as a Google Summer of Code project in some form. If this happened it would need someone in the community to help mentor it and find a suitable wiki willing to try out the idea and help test it. It seems enwiki is probably not the best testing ground. The extension remains on Hebrew Wiki and Wikivoyage but usage is low there. Any interest/ideas in helping with that?

I am certainly open to testing it out! I'm primarily an enwiki user, and that's where I'd want to use it, but given hopes of a return I'm happy to work on other wikis for the time being. Would en.wikivoyage.org be included? I am somewhat active there. The appeal for me again is being able to manage custom watchlists, to sort of separate out things I'm interesting in editing and follow changes to those pages. Having it all in one feed is cumbersome, and filtering by mainspace is only really helpful if you're active outside the mainspace. We have a lot of stubborn old-timers across WMF projects that shun any sort of UI changes, but I'm willing to bet if they took the time to get comfortable with a working "custom watchlist" product like Gather, their jaws will drop!