Topic on Project talk:Sandbox/Structured Discussions test

As a PS to that long post, here's another long post. I mentioned above that I'd get into more detail about indents and tangents.

Wikitext talk pages use indentation for two different reasons -- to create visual separation between people's posts, and to create spin-off tangents that follow a different path than the main flow of conversation in a thread. They're both important functions, but they don't need the same mechanism, and I'd argue that trying to do both with indentations makes wikitext talk pages harder to participate in and understand.

Big, complicated Village pump conversations need lots of room for tangents and subthreads. A simple back-and-forth conversation between two people doesn't need that. But we've spent years counting colons and fixing other people's indentations, to the point where it feels like a conversation can only be worthwhile if it's diagonal.

The indentation model that we've been using on Flow is kind of an unhappy compromise between the two different functions, and I don't think anybody likes it much. It retains the idea that a reply should be indented just because, but then it only goes to two levels of indentation. Once a thread reaches the second indentation level, you can't create an out-of-synch tangent even if you want to.

So we've figured out a new reply/indentation model that separates those two functions. We've been testing it out on the flow-tests server [1], and we're going to release it to Mediawiki soon.

Here's how it works:

If you're replying to the most recent post, then your reply just lines up under the previous message. A two-person back and forth conversation just looks flat, and the visual separation is noted with the user name and timestamp.

If you're specifically replying to a previous post, then your reply creates an indented tangent. If everybody responding on that tangent replies to the last message in that subthread, then it'll stay at the same indentation level. But if someone replies to an older message within the subthread, then that creates a third indentation level. I think we've got it set to a maximum of 8 possible indentation levels, and we just stop it there because there's a point where you can't fit a lot of text in each line.

The big idea of the new system is that the indentation should actually mean something. You should be able to tell the difference between a simple conversation and a complicated conversation at a glance, and using indented tangents helps you to spot the places in a conversation where there's a disagreement or a deeper level of detail.

We've been running tests comparing the old and new indentation models with several groups, and I think it's promising. You can check out the two models here:

-- New model: http://flow-tests.wmflabs.org/wiki/Talk:Something -- Old model (with 8 levels of indentation): http://ee-flow.wmflabs.org/wiki/Talk:SomethingElse

So that is the Grand Unified Theory of Flow Indentation, in theory and practice. I would be happy to hear what you think about it. There is a very good chance that this model will continue the Flow tradition of pleasing exactly nobody, and if that's the case, then we can keep talking about it and making more changes. But there's also a chance that this is brilliant and solves everything, so I want to give it a shot and see what happens.

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Reply 05:26, 28 March 2015 9 years ago

Ricordisamoa (talkcontribs)

Of course I know of phab:T92400. This is Talk:Sandbox, so I was just testing the new model out. Thanks for the reply anyway.