The Virtual Team Explorer (VTE) is a User Script intended to facilitate WikiProject exploration and coordination. It is currently still a work in progress, but it is under active development.
Collaboration would be gladly accepted - if you're interested in helping out, leave me a note and we'll see what type of work can be contributed.
Installation[edit]
Installation is pretty straightforward and follows the normal steps for users script. If you install as follows, you'll get the current version of the tool as well as all future updates.
- Copy the line below and place it in your common.js file:
importScript( 'User:Md_gilbert/vte.js' );
- Save the common.js page
- Completely refresh your browser by bypassing your cache.
And that's it! Once you refresh your browser you should be able to get started right away!
Getting Started[edit]
The following sections will walk through the basic functionality of the VTE. This is still a work in progress, however, so if you find any bugs or have any functionality requests, please leave a message on the Talk page.
The Project Browser[edit]
The entry point to the VTE is the Project Browser, pictured below.
The goal for the project browser is to allow users an easy way to find active projects along a number of metrics. Want to find a project that has the most edits in the last 30 days to the project-related pages? Boom, click the "Sort by project edits" button and the list updates to show you exactly that. If you're looking for a project with the most edits to pages under the scope of the project, just click the "Sort by edits" button and you're there.
Additionally, if you already know the name of the project you want to explore, you can type it in the search bar above the project browser. The thumbnail list will be reduced to only those matching the text you typed, as well as a dropdown from the search bar that will be populated with just those matching your search.
Once you find the project you're curious about, just click it and you'll be taken to the project summary.
Project summary[edit]
The project summary is intended to give you a high level overview of activity within that project over time, pictured below.
The top graph shows edits to the WikiProject Biography page (in blue) and the corresponding Talk page (in grey). This high level view gives you a chance to easily see the level of project activity over the life of the project. If you're looking for an up-and-comer, this will show you which projects seem to be experiencing a recent spike in activity. If you're looking for a long-standing steady project, this would be where you'd go.
Underneath the project graph are a number of graphs showing the most active articles in the scope of the project in the last 30 days. Each graph displays a year-long view of the article and talk page activity.
The Task Browser[edit]
The Task Browser in the VTE is an attempt to provide a more structured means of both creating and tracking tasks relevant to a WikiProject's goals. An example of the task list is included below:
If you create a task, it will be added to a sub-page under the Vtebot user (see the Integrating VTE pages with your WikiProject section to read more about the location and structure of the data). The task creation view allows you to add a task title, description, due date, owner, and any number of subtasks that you may want to add. In the main task browser view (shown above), you can see the task creation date (which will be red if the due date for that task has passed, as the first row above shows), followed by the task priority, title, any comments on that task, and the task owner. Tasks that have been completed are displayed by default (for instance, the third task in the image above), but can be filtered out by selecting the "View" dropdown above the list.
The task comments section is actually populated by the User_talk:Vtebot/<WikiProject name>/Tasks page (automatically created when the project was initially loaded). When tasks are created with the VTE, a new section is automatically added to this page that will allow human editors to discuss the task, as well as allow the VTE to automatically parse and update conversations from within the application for the relevant task.
The Member Browser[edit]
The Member browser in the VTE allows users to view a procedurally defined membership roster for any given WikiProject. An example representation for WikiProject Chemistry is shown below:
The member browser provides a quick, high-level view of both the explicit and implicit members of a project. As illustrated in the graph above, the explicit members (blue nodes) include any user that has a link to their own user page on any of the project pages or sub-pages. The implicit members (grey nodes) include any user who edited a project page or sub-page. Further, you can quickly see what either implicit or explicit members have been working on through the yellow nodes (pages outside the scope of the WikiProject) and red nodes (pages within the scope of the WikiProject).
In the live version of the VTE, you can mouse over each of these nodes to get more information about each user and article represented in the graph.
About the data[edit]
Data to populate the VTE currently comes from two locations:
- The MediaWiki API - This allows grabbing the actual text of WikiProject and WikiProject Talk pages live.
- The Re:Flex API - This is a custom interface we created to provide higher-level aggregate data about all users, pages, and revisions in Wikipedia. Additionally, this interface provides a hook into many other WikiProject related data that would be tedious or time consuming to get through other channels. More detailed documentation on how to access this API, as well as the relevant code to replicate it, can be found at its Github page.
We have attempted to design the VTE in a way where data can be easily integrated from multiple sources. If there are additional APIs that could provide meaningful user experiences, or that may allow us to expand the utility or impact of this application, please leave a comment on the Talk page and let us know.
Integrating VTE pages with your WikiProject[edit]
When the VTE loads a new project, it creates (currently) two pages for that project for both the Task and Member browsers. These are created under the user Vtebot. So, for instance, if you load WikiProject Human Computer Interaction, a page will be created at:
User:Vtebot/WikiProject_Human_Computer_Interaction/Tasks
and
User:Vtebot/WikiProject_Human_Computer_Interaction/Members
These pages are created under the Vtebot user so that you can more easily try, test, and play with the VTE application without interrupting any current project activity. The structure and format of the data in these pages utilizes the ListMaster and ListItem modules to simplify data management, with the hope that the data structure on each page can be more easily edited and read by both human editors as well as parsed and updated by external tools (i.e., the VTE).
If you would like to use these lists on your own project pages, all you need to do is transclude them on a WikiProject page or sub-page in the same way you would for any other template.
What remains[edit]
There are many different ideas for this tool that have yet to be implemented. I'd like to get to them all, but if you have any ideas or requests, please let me know on the Talk page and we can try to work on the things that have the most value.