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Is anyone aware of an already existing MediaWiki Extension that would allow users to ask questions in a similar manner to this website or yahoo answers. I've been looking for an extension to allow users to ask/answer questions referring to specific pages for my wiki and I was hoping someone might have already implemented this.

I've been having no luck while searching considering the key words I've been using to describe what I'm looking for end up returning a wide range of results.

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3 Answers 3

up vote 1 down vote accepted

I think there are currently these options:

  1. The simplest is the talk page, available for every article. You could use a main page talk (see Wikipedia example - though Wikipedia uses it only for discussion about main page content, not for general discussion) or Village Pump / Community portal idea for general discussions. Not ideal but it works.
  2. You can improve on this somewhat using the LiquidThreads extension. This enhances the talk pages but does not include gaming elements found here (e.g. up votes).
  3. If you just want to get community views, you can use a poll like QPoll.
  4. Finally, you can use a Chat room.

FWIW - I asked a similar question over on meta.

(You may also be interested in Wikis and Wikipedia.)

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Alright, thanks. I'm probably going to end up throwing something together myself since the boss wants it for his Wiki. I'll let you know if I can offer it to the community since you were interested in a similar feature. –  Dave Mar 24 '11 at 14:39
If you are going to throw the whole thing together, you might want to take a look at Semantic MediaWiki and invest some time learning to use Semantic Forms as well. These two extensions will give you building blocks to develop various applications, including Q&A. –  Laurent Alquier Apr 2 '11 at 2:58

Currently there is Wikia Answers that is essentially MediaWiki based website but with excremental extensions for Q&A.

Many of its extensions are not yet available directly for download (You may get the website extensions on https://github.com/Wikia

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I would be questioning why you're using Wikipedia for a project like this in the first place. It simply isn't designed for it. I think that you'd get more out of looking at a system that thinks about a website as a collection of datachunks, rather than a collection of documents (which is what wikipedia is GREAT at). Something like Drupal is going to get you where you want to be far faster that wikipedia - in fact, it's already be done: https://drupal.org/project/answers. I wouldn't be surprised if something similar exists for joomla, or even wordpress.

If you're looking at wikipedia because you're already using it for part of your site, there's no reason why you can't run another CMS alongside it.

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