User:Тишина

year old American. I signed up to help make Miraheze more popular and user friendly by contributing what I can to make for a better user experience.

My wiki:
 * https://tishina.miraheze.org

I made a forum for general wiki discussion under "Miraheze Chat" if anyone prefers the forum style to wiki talk pages.


 * https://tishina.miraheze.org/wiki/Special:WikiForum

Core wikis

 * Meta Wiki
 * Developers' Wiki
 * Miraheze Commons
 * Template Wiki

Goals
I want to make the Miraheze wikis much more accessible then they currently are. The volunteers here have already done a wonderful job making improvements to MediaWiki that make it more user friendly but there's still a lot of work to be done. MediaWiki is notoriously difficult for new users to get started with. A lot of features are done through wiki markup code and adherence to conventions. The average person only wants to sign in to the wiki and start contributing without having to learn a whole system of information and tradition just to contribute what they know about a topic. I'm sure that wikis are losing out on a lot of potential contributors because of this. I want to make it as easy as possible for new users to get started and for new administrators to easily customize their wikis.

I want to improve Miraheze wikis to function in a way that allows anyone who doesn't have prior technical experience with wikis to be able to use them


 * Browser-based wiki import bot

The current system of migrating wiki content isn't friendly to people with a lot of technical experience. Exporting content isn't always user friendly and using an external script is beyond the ability of most casual users. Importing pages through the wiki doesn't always work for large wikis because of the amount of data being processed. My goal is to make an automated bot that allows wiki administrators to selected categories, lists of pages or entire wikis and import them with only a few clicks. I plan to add a one click import feature for Fandom wikis.


 * Improve talk pages and discussion pages

There is an extension that handles this already.

The process of contributing to wiki discussions is too unintuitive and dependent on convention to make it approachable to new users. The fact that new users to Miraheze are expected to engage in discussion by editing the markup of a page is almost certainly a barrier for entry. It might have worked years ago when editing wikis was a niche activity that was done by communities of people who knew all the conventions but it doesn't work a high school kid who wants to contribute what he knows about a video game.

One of my ideas to accomplish this is to use JavaScript to add new topic buttons that will add a new section to talk pages and reply buttons that will add a new post to that section. Indented replies will be lost using this system.