The Humble Hashtag, now on Wikipedia
Whether or not one approves of the term, hashtags are pretty much ubiquitous in the modern web. And why shouldn’t they be? They’re simple, interoperable, and most importantly semantic!
As of this week, we’ve added to L2W what may be the first instance of real hashtag support in the Wikipedia ecosystem. That’s a real screenshot above! Just scroll past the languages and start entering the comma-separated tags you want to follow. Then go edit and add hashtags. How, you say?
Whenever you make an edit, anonymous or otherwise, you can attach a comment or summary before you submit. Our livestream now searches for and includes any hashtags that an editor included in that field, allowing us to filter edits to just a select group.
We originally conjured up this functionality for Editathons, which are often theme-based periods of coordinated editing. Because these these gatherings of Wikipedians is often distributed, we felt there should be an interface that helps these groups highlight the impact they’re having among the normal Wikipedia edit activity. Honestly, we’re still working on the details of the feature, but we wanted it to be ready in time for the various #WomensHistoryMonth and #WomensDay editathons going on around the world this week and this month. (Art+Feminism being one.)
If all goes according to plan, in the near future we’ll be:
- Tweaking the hashtag interface to be a bit sleeker
- Adding @mention support to the UI (it’s already there in the Wikimon livestream)
- Releasing some tools for retrieving edit histories based on #hashtags and @mentions. We have a really basic one up here now. Example URL: http://tools.wmflabs.org/hashtags/search/blacklivesmatter. Hint though, there are virtually no hashtagged edits as of writing (Editors Note: by March 2016, there’s quite a few!).
Keep on editing!
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