MDN/Projects/Development/Content Annotations

This is a proposed plan for a project to add annotation support to the MDN wiki powered by Kuma. It's a longer-term project; something we need, but isn't necessarily urgent.

Project statement

The goal of this project is to encourage more community involvement--and to improve our ability to collaborate--by adding support for annotating and commenting on all or part of a document on MDN.

Features desired:

1. Ability to attach notes to a selected area of a document
2. Ability to reply to those notes
3. Ability to archive and/or delete notes
4. Spam filtering
5. Needs to be fully integrated into MDN, with no extra software required, and any logging into the service needs to use the same one as MDN itself
6. Should be able to toggle the interface for annotations on and off
7. Ability to "ping" people whose attention is needed
8. Possible integration with the review request mechanism?
9. Support for indicating when an annotation is no longer relevant (such as when its ideas are integrated into the article, or have been determined not to be relevant)

Goals

• Improve collaboration on MDN by making asynchronous discussions possible.
• Get more people invested in participating in the documentation process by letting them comment and add notes to articles if they're afraid to edit the content directly.

Inspirations

• http://hypothes.is/ - This is very, very similar to what we want, although we'd need to make changes to integrate it better into MDN. To try it out, visit http://hypothes.is/alpha and create an account.
• This page has several Hypothes.is annotations on it, so try it out.

Additional thoughts and requirements

Development resources

• Need to evaluate using Hypothes.is as a basis: http://hypothes.is/

Next steps

• We should have the interested parties try out Hypothes.is and take notes so we can have a discussion about what we want here.