Talk pages project/Replying

This page talks about the Editing Team's work to improve contributors' workflows for replying to comments on talk pages, across Wikipedia's 16 talk namespaces.This initiative sits within our team's larger effort to help contributors work together more effectively. To accomplish this, we will build upon existing community conventions to evolve talk pages. It is our intention to evolve talk pages in a way that gives experienced contributors more leverage to coordinate their work and connect with other editors, while making communicating on-wiki more accessible and intuitive for newer contributors.

To participate in and follow this project's development, we recommend adding this page to your watchlist. We will use this page to do things like:


 * Share potential designs and ask for feedback about them


 * Test prototypes
 * Post updates about this feature's development
 * Ask and invite questions about any part of this project (e.g. measurement, deployments, etc.)

Open questions
This section will contain questions the team could use your help trying to answer.

Updates
This section will contain updates about the project's development.

Objectives
This work is intended to make participating productively on talk pages easier and more intuitive for contributors.

Where "easier" means more experienced contributors can participate in existing discussions with less effort and "intuitive" means newer contributors do not need specialized knowledge to figure out how to add their thoughts to a conversation. Said in a different way: as a result of this work, both newer and more experienced contributors should report the workflow for participating in existing discussions to be "obvious" and "approachable."

It is important to note the mention of "participating productively" in the first paragraph of this section. We appreciate it is not enough to build tools that simply encourage contributors to "talk more"; they need to encourage people to work together to help improve the project they are discussing.

While we are still defining how to measure the impact of this feature, a key part of this work will involve figuring out how to understand the impact this new affordance has had on the quality of discussions on the talk pages it is deployed to.

Metrics
This section will contain the metrics we will use to measure the impact of this feature.

Background
This year, the Editing Team is committed to improving how contributors communicate and collaborate on Wikipedia, using talk pages.

For talk pages to be valuable, contributors need to intuitively know how to participate in the conversations that happen on them.

Trouble is – as previous user testing, the Talk Page Consultation and the team's research uncovered – contributors, across experience levels, find replying to specific comments on Talk pages to be challenging.

Specifically, the team's research has found:


 * More experienced contributors find it difficult to locate the specific comment they are wanting to reply to when participating in long, multi-person conversations, within big blocks of wikitext.
 * Newer contributors report not being sure how to reply to a conversation, regardless of its length or complexity.

In exploring an affordance for replying to specific comments on talk pages, we are striving to make participating productively on talk pages easier and more intuitive. We think doing so will help newer contributors understand and use talk pages as places to communicate with others and help more senior contributors collaborate more efficiently.

Challenges
One part of building new features is codifying social conventions in software. In this context, "conventions" could mean deciding what character the software should use for automatically indenting or outdenting replies. "Conventions" could also mean deciding how the software should represent the first comment in a discussion in wikitext: ''Is there a linebreak between the reply and the original comment? Is the reply added to the line immediately following the original comment in the discussion? Is there another way this comment should be represented?''

It is unlikely all wikis will answer these questions in the same way. This means the software needs to be built in a flexible enough way to accommodate these different preferences. This is possible, although it adds complexity to the design and development processes.

Design
This section will contain details about functionality and potential designs.

User testing
''This section will contain information about user testing we conduct as part of the development of this feature. This section will also contain findings from these tests.''

History
Many projects have, and are, working to improve contributors' experiences with talk pages. This project is better off for their existence. Some of the projects the team continues to learn from are listed on the main project page and below. If there is a project you think we should be aware of, please boldly add it here.


 * Convenient Discussions
 * Flow satisfaction survey
 * Moderated Testing, November 2014: talk pages and Flow
 * Reply-link
 * Talk pages consultation

Glossary
The glossary linked below is intended to help us all communicate about talk pages more effectively by making sure we have a shared understanding about the words we use in our discussions and documentation throughout the project:

Talk pages project glossary