User:PPelberg (WMF)/sandbox

List items are fragile in wikitext, and there are many things (e.g., tables and images) that cannot be effectively embedded in lists. The Editing Team and Parsing Team are seeking your input on a proposal to introduce new wikitext syntax that will eliminate the aforementioned constraint and unlock new possibilities for people using wikitext talk pages.

You can find information about what is being proposed and how you can help shape it below.

Participate
The teams need to know what you think about this proposal. Specifically, the team is curious to know how you will answer the following questions:
 * 1) Of the proposals listed below, which do you think would best satisfy the requirements?
 * 2) What alternative approaches do you think should be considered?
 * 3) For each of the proposals listed below, what other advantages, disadvantages and/or unknowns do you think should be considered?

In addition to the above, the teams would also value hearing what other questions and ideas the proposals lead you to think about.

If you are new to technical RFCs, then read Requests for comment.

You can provide input by doing the following:


 * Posting on this page's talk page: LINK.
 * Posting to this ticket in Phabricator: LINK.

Motivation
This section contains information about why this particular change is necessary and why making this change now is a priority.

Existing problems

The lack of explicit syntax for multi-line comments makes it hard to add complex content types within lists, including discussions that use list formatting for visual indentation. Specifically, this means:


 * Contributors are limited in the types of things (e.g., tables and images) they are able to include in properly formatted lists (read: talk page comments). This inhibits them from being able to communicate about and collaborate on components like navboxes, series templates, and infoboxes within indented comments on talk pages. When contributors really need to use such features, they'll sometimes break out of the indentation structure. This makes it harder for readers, bots, and software to understand the structure of a conversation.
 * Contributors face a higher risk of markup errors contained with talk page comments posted using DiscussionTools "leaking out" and corrupting content elsewhere on the talk page.
 * Contributors are not able to create visual line breaks within the list structure without using HTML code or local templates.
 * Contributors who use screen readers have a more difficult time understanding conversations, and subsequently participating in them, because the tools they use are not able to properly narrate/speak/announce the comments in a talk page conversation. Source
 * People using features like the new Reply Tool are not able to use templates, tables and extensions in the tool's  mode.

New opportunities

In addition to the resolving the issues listed above, introducing syntax for multi-line comments would enable people to:


 * Edit specific comments on talk pages. This is functionality that had been planned, but became blocked because of this lack of syntax. For more information, see: T242562#5897905.
 * Build new gadgets that extend talk page functionality because comment parsing would become more reliable.

This example uses a numbered list to make the problem easy to see, but the same problems appear in all lists: bullet lists made with , numbered lists made with  , and definition lists made with   and. This problem is seen in many thousands of pages, especially talk pages.

Requirements
This section contains the requirements any proposal must need for it to be adopted.


 * The new new syntax must enable people to include components[i] that span multiple lines within an indented list item.
 * The new syntax must not break existing content on talk pages.
 * The new syntax must be interoperable with existing-and-future list-item talk page markup.
 * The new syntax must work across all languages and be reasonably convenient to input using different text input methods.
 * The new syntax must be compatible with the core parser.
 * People looking at a diff or the wikitext source for a page must be able to recognize the new syntax as being part of the comment's formatting, and not part of the content.

Proposals
This section contains the different approaches

#1
Advantages

Disadvantages

Unknowns

#2
Advantages

Disadvantages

Unknowns

#3
Advantages

Disadvantages

Unknowns