Thread:Talk:Flow/Response to Quora question

User:Jorm (WMF) asked on Quora: What do you find confusing about Wikipedia's discussion systems? I'm moving my answer here so it's available on the open web.

Since perspective is important on this, here's where I'm coming from: I'm a long time (8 year) heavy user of MediaWiki (many different sites), most notably English Wikipedia; and I do a great deal of work with first-time and developing wiki contributors. So, my comments reflect both my own needs, and my perception of the needs of the people I teach.

Things that don't get discussed much, but are big opportunities for improvement:
 * Links (to talk pages, to section headers of talk pages) do not persist through through archiving. Asynchronous, eventualist communication is one of the core strengths of wiki software; this is a major exception. (e.g., I link today to a conversation -- from Twitter, say -- but next month, that link goes nowhere useful.)
 * It's difficult to provide context. Outside Wikipedia, most of my collaborative writing is in Google Docs; and the "comment" feature, where you highlight exactly the chunk of text you are talking about, is incredibly useful. I find myself missing the ability to easily point others to exactly what I'm talking about frustrating.
 * There's no easy way to "search ahead" when typing somebody's username or other internal link. The HotCat extension has this capability; on Twitter and Facebook, when I type "@" followed by the first few letters of a friend's name, it starts to guess what I mean. A feature like this in MediaWiki would be hugely helpful.
 * No "ping" notification. If somebody tags me in Facebook, I am notified; if somebody links my name in a Wikipedia discussion, there's no notification capability.
 * Posting diffs can be a really important element of descriptive or persuasive discussion. A quicker and/or more intuitive way to find and paste a diff would be a big help.

Obvious/well-known issues with perceiving what is going on:
 * When somebody comments on my user talk, do I reply on my own page or on theirs? There are pros and cons to both.
 * When somebody replies to me, I'd like to be notified. "Watch list" is too  general, expecting them to tell me on my own user talk is too onerous.
 * Same as #2, but cross-wiki: multiple languages, multiple projects.
 * Too-specific time stamps result in a whole lot of clutter. It's very, very rare that information about what precise time a comment was left is important to the discussion; if that information is preserved a click away (e.g. in edit history), it could be left out of the display in the context of discussion. Perhaps dynamically: for instance, anything more than 3 hours old suppresses the minutes and seconds, anything than two days old suppresses the time of day.

Obvious/well known issues with adding comments:
 * I shouldn't have to think about whether/how much I am indenting…much less need to use markup to do so.
 * I shouldn't have to remember to sign.

… I will try to come back and add to this. Thanks for asking!