Talk pages consultation 2019/Phase 1 report/Survey/en

The Talk pages consultation is a global consultation planned from February to June 2019, to bring Wikimedians and wiki-minded people together to define better tools for wiki communication.

The consultation will seek input from as many different parts of the Wikimedia community as possible – on multiple projects, in multiple languages, and with multiple perspectives – to come up with a product direction for a set of communication features that a product team will be able to work on in the coming fiscal year.

The Phase 1 report has been posted. We are currently collecting responses to the Phase 2 trade-off questions. The end date for feedback is June 15.

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 * 1) What do you think of the proposed product direction?
 * Context: The Wikimedia Foundation proposes building a new, clearer design on top of existing wikitext talk pages. It will offer simpler tools for replying, indentation and signatures. You could continue to use wikitext on talk pages, if you prefer that. It should also be possible to participate in a discussion without using wikitext.
 * Question: What do you think of this product direction?
 * 1) Marking separate discussions
 * Context: People want to watch individual sections on the talk page. They want better notifications, archiving, and search.  To do any of this, we may need to create a more structured definition of what counts as a single discussion. This may mean making changes to the wikitext conventions on a talk page. For example, we may create a new way that discussion headings look in wikitext, or a new link that you need to use to create, rename or split a thread.
 * Question: What are the advantages and disadvantages of that approach?
 * 1) Helping newcomers find the talk pages
 * Context: Newcomers have difficulty finding talk pages.  During user tests, only one person out of ten found the  tab. Most testers looked for a  tab on the opposite side of the page, where all of the other tabs and links are. Many people also expected to see links to discussions about specific sections in the article. We may want to move the link to the talk page to the opposite side of the article page.  We might add discussion functionality connected to individual sections.
 * Question: What are the advantages and disadvantages of making the connection between article content and discussions more visible?
 * 1) Where to show discussion tools
 * Context: Currently, many wikis have community discussion spaces in the project namespace (  or  ), rather than in a talk namespace (  or  ). The project namespace is often used for village pumps/cafés, noticeboards, and some workflows, such as Articles for deletion. The system will need to know where discussions happen, so that it can display the new tools in those discussions, and not display them on other pages. There are several potential ways to do this. One of them is to move all discussions to a talk namespace.
 * Question: What are the advantages and disadvantages of doing that?
 * 1) History tradeoffs
 * Context: Sometimes, you need to see the history of the entire page.  Other times, it would be more helpful to see the history of only a single discussion thread. It would be ideal if we could provide both, but we're not sure how to do that.
 * Question: What are the advantages and disadvantages of having a complete page history or a specific thread history?
 * 1) Metadata location
 * Context: Some wikis place templates at the top of article talk pages.  These may show instructions, warnings, or FAQs.  They may hold page quality information, link to relevant WikiProjects, or identify past activities.  Many new users are confused by finding non-discussion material at the top of an article talk page.  It would be helpful to move some or all of that content somewhere else on the page, or under a different tab.
 * Question: What are the advantages and disadvantages of that approach? Which templates are crucial for the proper use of a discussion page, and which could be moved somewhere else?
 * 1) What is your primary wiki?
 * 2) * (list of wikis)
 * 3) Which of the following best describes you?
 * 4) * I have never edited Wikipedia or contributed content on any Wikimedia project.
 * 5) * I'm a newcomer to Wikipedia and the Wikimedia projects.
 * 6) * I'm an occasional contributor.
 * 7) * I'm an active, experienced contributor.
 * 8) Have you previously answered some or all of these questions online?