A recent discussion on en.WP highlighted that we do not have any sort of table of contents in the user preferences tabs (and specifically the Gadgets tab), which can result in difficulty navigating a particular tab on Special:Preferences. (permalink) While we might be able to control user preferences such that there are fewer rather than more, the Gadgets tab doesn't really have the luxury of "remove gadgets" when it's more likely that we will continue to move more scripts to Gadget land (for many reasons, such as safety and trust).
Description
Description
| Status | Subtype | Assigned | Task | ||
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Open | None | T64559 Redesign Special:Preferences (tracking) | |||
| Open | Feature | None | T217606 Add tables of contents on preference tabs | ||
| Duplicate | None | T217680 Generate IDs for gadget fieldsets in Special:Preferences | |||
| Resolved | matmarex | T126962 Support linking to a specific Gadget or Gadget section in preference (HTML ids, permalink, CSS :target) |
Event Timeline
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Split the second paragraph to T293724: Allow gadgets to be displayed (listed) on specific Preferences panes.
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See also: T313804: Add ability to search Special:Preferences
(IMO a better and more conventional option. although one doesn't exclude the other)
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In my humble opinion if your Preferences pages become so long that you need a ToC then feature creep in your application is the problem to solve instead... :)
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Gadgets are a common solution, and refrain from MediaWiki developers as a solution, about things the developers change that people don't like.
That's ignoring that our gadgets page is actually not long enough today, given the practice of importing JavaScript from other users directly rather than the Safer alternatives that are gadgets.
I don't really think "feature creep" is a reasonable response to either of those two concerns, especially the second one. We should be encouraging users toward gadgets and making more scripts into gadgets, and not away, and having a difficult to use or access gadgets preferences page does the latter rather than the former. Extension of core functionality is the very reason the Gadgets extension exists.
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Pretty much every major preferences UI these days has a ToC.
But MediaWiki already has one, in the form of tabs, Not sure how a second level is supposed to integrate with that.
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I was envisioning an "inline" table of contents, much like most skins display (not V22), before the first section. I wouldn't have a problem with some horizontal version of the same or similar like the "tabs" in Watchlist.