Type of activity: Pre-scheduled session
Main topic: Handling wiki content beyond plaintext
The problem
A number of users want to add "out of band" data to articles, tied to a particular place or range in the article:
- Google Docs-style comments (or suggested edits) on articles, anchored to a specific part of the article (see T147896)
- Pronunciation annotations for spoken wikipedia (Wikispeech)
- Translation correspondence information for the Content Translation Service
- Translation correspondence as an alternative backend for the Translate extension
- Citation regions (there's an alternative proposal using T114432: [RFC] Heredoc arguments for templates (aka "hygienic" or "long" arguments))
- Handle merge conflicts by attaching edits as temporary annotations, then fetching those edits against the current version.
- Highlight wikivoyage content parts, to built a travel itinerary
It is proposed that an annotation service be built to serve these use cases.
Expected outcome
- Gathering additional use cases for an annotation service.
- Defining core API
- Diving into what it means to pull an annotation against an old version into the present. How should "fuzzy" matches be marked?
Current status of the discussion
- The Parsoid team originally thought of these as use cases for "stable IDs". But a satisfactory spec for stable ids couldn't be found.
- Annotation server idea was pitched to the 2016 Editing Offsite
- A IEG grant proposal page for the annotation server exists
- A rough prototype has been built, based on hypothes.is to implement the functionality of Extension:Translate