From Vaporstory

Current revision as of 17:18, 14 June 2007

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[edit] Slider idea

[edit] Need

The need is for a simpler way of rating articles quality and standards

[edit] Research/brief

After looking deeply into the problems of other wikis and their systems, i have discovered that they are not "Present" enough. By this i mean templates are not used when maybe they should have been. This is maybe because of their nature, they arnt at the users fingertips when they need it, so I have decided to design a new system, for which the user can ajust the status when and where its needed.

[edit] Solutions

• Slider bar - this is a stale type thing where the desired option can be dragged to where it is wanted.
• Dropdown menu - This is a classic selection menu which drops down and can be changed using a click and then a selecting click.
• Edit box Buttons for the templates - Although this is by far the simplest, it is also the least effective, the bar would get clogged up with little icons for each template and users would want their own templates added.

I have chosen the sliding bar solution because it is the most visual and interesting. In a way it puts the rating bar style stars to a different use.

[edit] Specification

This is a detailing for my idea of a article content slider:

• Slide-able bar which can be ajusted in several ways
• The bar contains two sectors, a white area and a grey area as shown above, the grey area is where only admins can move the selector.
• Extension which can read settings from a Mediawiki: page
• The white area can be specified using the mediawiki page as to where it is selectable. It is possible to set the grey area to different sizes (as a percentage) depending on the size (in bytes) of the article (Stated as an inequality i.e.

Grey area rights follow:
10<20% //locked at 20% for all articles under 10 bytes 
10>30% //locked at 30% for articles above 10 bytes 
50>50% //locked at 50% for articles above 50 bytes, if two conflict, then the bar should take the largest byte size that applies, for a 56byte article it would be at 50%, but for a 49 byte article it would stay at 30%

• User groups can be specified as to their status:

i.e.

User Rights follow:
IP=0 //unable to effect at all
user=1 //white area only
sysop=2 //grey area as well
crat=2
banned=0

• Users which have contributed over a certain amount are also locked out at the preference of the Mediawiki: page

Contrib rights follow:
new=0 //The person who created the page can be adjusted
user10=0=120 //users who have put in over a specified amount of bytes to the article, in this case 10 are also locked out. this can be applied to all user-groups, the final value specifies the number of days in which a user is locked out for, if none is given, take it as infinate.

• the different words along the top can be specified as well:

titles follow:
t.one=Delete=10%
t.two=keep=30%
t.three=Feature=70%

their rough placement is specified, and if they will not fit at size 12, they should alternate between high and low above the bar.

• The width of the bar should be specifiable in percent or pixel width
• The slider should be split into 100 equal increments, but it should be possible to reduce this with a value.
• A drop-down-box should appear with information that is again specified by the mediawiki:page this drop down box should work under wikicoding.

i.e.

messages follow:
m.one=messege //this should round to the nearest title, so if the t.one value is closest it diplays this messege.
m.two=messege
           //if no value is given for a title no box is displayed.
defult=the default value //this is a message which should appear in all message boxes.

• A this is a Constant thing, the slider may need a save button to send the data back to the server
• Admins should be able to lock sliders which are abused and they should auto-lock if the page is protected.
• The sliders should use a "sticky" method, where if a user moves it, it moves entirely (not an average), the value of the slider is stored on a DB table as a value from 1-100.

[edit] The grey area

This area should appear grey to all users, but users with the correct permissions can move the selector into the grey area, once there, users without the correct permissions cannot move it back to the white area. but the bar still has the grey bit as though the whole bar was not locked out. Users with no permissions to do anything with the bar see it as entirely grey.