Talk pages consultation 2019/Phase 2 report

The 2019 Talk pages consultation (TPC) has reached the end of Phase 2, the final phase of the Wikimedia Foundation's global consultation.

In Phase 1, we asked contributors how they use talk pages, and the problems that they experience. The Phase 1 report, published in May, offered a new product direction for an upcoming project, and posed specific questions for Phase 2. This report, published in August, summarizes what people said and what we learned during Phase 2, and explains the plans for the coming year.


 * by the Talk Pages Consultation team: Danny Horn, Benoît Evellin, Sherry Snyder, Thomas Meadows and Peter Pelberg

Introduction
In Phase 1 of the consultation, we identified two major themes:


 * Clear design and appropriate tools: Right now, article pages and talk pages are very similar in their appearance and functionality. That similarity is misleading, and makes it more difficult for people to learn how to use talk pages correctly.
 * Features vs flexibility: The desire for talk page improvements is not limited to new contributors. In fact, experienced contributors are the ones who know how inadequate the existing tools really are. Experienced users want to follow a single discussion on an active talk page, and to find discussions easily and quickly, even if the discussions have been moved to an archive. In order to provide these features, the system needs to be able to tell what "a discussion" is – that this specific part of the page is a single discussion, and that it is separate from other edits on the same page. That may require making some changes that limit the endless flexibility of an open wikitext page.

With those themes in mind, we proposed the following product direction for the Wikimedia Foundation's Editing team to work on:

Wikitext talk pages should be improved, and not replaced.

We will build a new design on top of wikitext talk pages that changes the page's default appearance and offers key tools. This new design should communicate to the user that this is not a content page, and help the user interact appropriately with the tools. This should include clear signals for how to start a new discussion, and how to respond to an existing discussion, or to a specific message within that discussion. It should add the signature automatically, and place the message in the correct nesting order.

In order to keep consistency with the existing tools, this new design will be a default experience that existing users can opt out of. It should be possible for users to keep the view that they currently have, and work in wikitext instead of using the new tools.

However, to build features that experienced contributors need, there may be some small-to-medium changes in wikitext conventions and practices. Our intention is to only make changes when they're connected to a feature that contributors find useful.

In Phase 2, we asked a series of questions to test different aspects of this approach, essentially asking: what could go wrong with this project? Discussions were hosted on 12 wikis: nine Wikipedia languages – Chinese, Czech, Dutch, English, French, German, Polish, Russian and Thai – plus Wikidata, and English Wikisource. Individuals also left comments on this wiki at Talk pages consultation 2019/Individual feedback. You can read the community summaries from seven of the Phase 2 community discussions.

The responses that we received have helped us to think about potential drawbacks and create a set of important principles to remember. Below is a summary of our findings, including the five major concerns that we heard, and how those concerns have shaped our understanding of this project.