InlineComments is a MediaWiki extension that allows users to highlight text on a page and add comments to it, viewable inline within the page.

Comments are stored in a separate MediaWiki "slot", so they do not alter the wikitext, while still being tied to the page and showing up on watchlists and recent changes.

For more information, see the online documentation at: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:InlineComments

Version

InlineComments is currently at version 1.1. It works with MediaWiki version 1.40 and higher.

Installing

Copy the extension into your extensions directory in a directory named InlineComments.

Add wfLoadExtension( 'InlineComments' ); to the end of LocalSettings.php

Using

If you have the "inlinecomments-add" user right (by default, available to all logged-in users), if you select any text on a page, a small icon will appear. You can then add a comment by clicking the icon or typing ctrl+alt+m; a dialog will then appear to add your comment.

If you click on an already existing comment or discussion, tools appear to either close (delete) the discussion, or reply to it.

Configuration

You can set $wgInlineCommentsAutoDeleteComments = false; in your LocalSettings.php to disable automatically removing comments that aren't attached to any text in the page.

You can adjust who can make inline comments by adjusting what user groups have the inlinecomments-add user right using the $wgGroupPermissions variable. The default is logged in users only.

Uninstalling

You can uninstall the extension by removing wfLoadExtension( 'InlineComments' ); from LocalSettings.php

Pages that have comments on them will become unaccessible after uninstalling because MediaWiki does not know how to display them without the extension.

If you want the comment data to be retained you can add the following stub to LocalSettings.php to tell MediaWiki to simply ignore all comments and not display them.

$wgContentHandlers['annotation+json'] = FallbackContentHandler::class;
$wgHooks['MediaWikiServices'][] = static function ( $services ) { 
        $services->addServiceManipulator( 'SlotRoleRegistry', static function ( $reg ) { 
                if ( !$reg->isDefinedRole( 'inlinecomments' ) ) { 
                        $reg->defineRoleWithModel(
                                'inlinecomments',
                                'annotation+json',
                                [ 'display' => 'none' ]
                        );
                }   
        } );
};

If you want old comments to be viewable even without the extension installed, you can instead specify just

$wgContentHandlers['annotation+json'] = JsonContentHandler::class;

to have the comments be displayed as json data.

Alternatively you can run the maintenance scripts included with this extension to remove stored comment data:

• removeComments.php will delete all comments via MediaWiki edits. The comments will still be present on previous versions within the "inlinecomments" slot, which means that they will become unviewable if/when InlineComments is uninstalled - although they will of course be viewable again if it is re-installed.

• convertComments.php will convert the comments to something that MediaWiki understands without the extension installed. You can specify the following parameters:

  • --format json converts to JSON output.
  • --format fallback makes MediaWiki just show a not supported message.
  • --format comments undoes the work of the script.

The "json" and "fallback" formats only work if InlineComments is not installed.

cd extensions/InlineComments/maintenance php removeComments.php php convertCommentsToFallback.php --format fallback