Talk pages consultation 2019/Structure and updates

Consultation structure
This consultation will have a "hub-and-spoke" structure, with a central hub located here on mediawiki.org ("Talk Page Consultation central"). Over the course of the consultation, multiple participant groups will have discussions on other wikis and in off-wiki settings, and then contribute notes and findings back to TPC central. Some participant groups will participate through the whole process, others may participate for a limited time (especially if they're in real life/meet-ups). Everyone can follow along and participate at TPC central (language permitting).

Phase 0: Planning
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This was the planning phase. During this phase, we:


 * Publicly announced the project (banner info here), and invite questions and ideas from the Wikimedia community
 * Set up TPC central documentation structure; current notes are featured on the main TPC page, while historical staff notes can be found here and here
 * Created a list of wikis and user groups for initial outreach and invite groups to sign up
 * Established code of conduct guidelines
 * Began retrospective process for StructuredDiscussions/Flow, Liquid Threads and wikitext workflows, collect important documentation
 * Began outreach to participant groups
 * Invited volunteers to facilitate discussions, and participate in other ways
 * Created the schedule for phase 1

Phase 1: Collect information (started)
Source: TPC Feedback from volunteer participant groups and individuals

When: Mid-March - April; Community summaries posted by April 6, 2019

During this phase we will solicit open feedback from a wide range of individuals and groups about their experiences with talk pages or alternative tools. Questions are:


 * 1) When you want to discuss a topic with your community, what tools work for you, and what problems block you? Why?
 * 2) How do newcomers use talk pages, and what blocks them from using it?
 * 3) What do others struggle with in your community about talk pages?
 * 4) What do you wish you could do on talk pages, but can't due to the technical limitations?

The information collection has started when the first messages have been sent. Check if a group exists for your language.

Wrapping up the conversations
Community summaries are due by April 6, 2019. We advise communities, especially the ones that would have had collected a lot of replies, to end the conversation by March 31. That way, volunteers making the wrapping-up have time to make it.

Since this consultation is based on a different consultation process than how consultations are defined by local rules, those rules regarding how to close conversations may not be applied.


 * Post and read the summaries

Phase 2: Trade-offs and prioritization
Source: TPC Feedback from volunteer participant groups and individuals

When: Starts in early May

Some ideas generated during phase 1 may be mutually exclusive. Some ideas might work better for some purposes or some kinds of users. We'll have to talk about which problems are more urgent, which projects are most closely aligned with the overall needs and goals of the movement, and which ideas we should focus on first.

Discussions about these trade-offs will be moderated by the Wikimedia Foundation, guided by our decision criteria, listed below.

Space for unexpected discoveries
Within the scope of this project, all the options are on the table. There are no hidden agendas. We don't know all the things, and we don't know what we might learn. We need to accept these "unknown unknowns".

The schedule of this consultation may change because of these unexpected discoveries.

Phase 3: Review potential direction
Source: TPC Feedback from volunteer participant groups and individuals

When: June 2019 (tentative)

We invite everyone back to the central page on MediaWiki.org to review the emerging direction for this project.

Status report: Wrapping up Phase 1
Thanks to everyone who's participated in the Talk Pages Consultation so far! We're wrapping up the discussions for Phase 1 and compiling all the results, which will lead into the start of Phase 2 in May.

The purpose of Phase 1 has been to collect as much information as we can about how people use talk pages, documenting the advantages and challenges, and generating ideas for making improvements. We've also collected information about communication tools that people are using now, both on-wiki and off-wiki. People have hosted group discussions on more than 15 wikis and at events, and we've also received individual feedback from many people. You can see the summaries of the wiki discussions here, which has links to the original discussions.

In addition, as part of Phase 1, we're currently running some user tests with people who are active Wikipedia readers and would like to become editors, in order to document what it's like for them to communicate on-wiki. The tests are just starting now; we'll post results over the next couple of weeks.

For the rest of April, the team is working on bringing together all the information and ideas that you've provided. We're reading all of the discussions, summaries and feedback, and putting it together into a big report that we'll publish at the beginning of May. The report will reflect all of the major themes from the discussions, so we all have a shared understanding of the issues that have been raised. It will also include a list of all the things that people want to accomplish on talk pages. (People in software development call these "user stories"; you can see the current draft list here).

Once we publish that report and people have had a chance to look at it and respond, we'll start Phase 2 in May. This is the "tradeoffs" phase, where we'll ask more specific questions about how to balance different user stories. The discussions we have in Phase 2 will help us to put together ideas to propose for a product direction in Phase 3. (You can see some early notes on the tradeoffs phase here.)

We'll post more updates on the Talk pages consultation 2019 page, as we work on the Phase 1 report together, with links to the current work. We're excited and inspired by all of the ideas that people have posted so far; thank you for being a part of this project! -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 16:08, 17 April 2019 (UTC)

May 1, 2019
The final touches are being put on sifting through and organizing all the information gathered from Phase 1 of the project. The projected release of the report to users is the end of the week, though that is certainly not set in stone. As it stands, new feedback was incorporated from third-party MediaWiki sites and there is still a need for better translation for the Hungarian feedback.

For the report itself, the determination was made to present direct quotes first, then their EN translations. User testing was recently completed and a summary of those findings will also be included. Some of the more interesting points was that talk/discussion pages weren't immediately apparent to users and, once they were found, users weren't exactly certain what was going on within them. The same interface as articles seemed to be misleading.

A meeting is happening (WikiSalon) in the office tonight that Danny (DannyH) will be attending. Since Phase 1 is complete, Danny will be presenting the TPC project and what the team has found, looking for thoughts and reactions, focusing on features versus flexibility, and sharing the user testing.

This meeting is indicative of what Phase 2 will look like: looking for feedback on findings, figuring out what direction to take based on that feedback, and serious discussions about trade-offs. Some things communities have expressed a need for might be easier to implement, such as automatic signatures and indenting. Other things, such as the various way threads are created and then subsequently treated, will be much harder. There needs to be a discussion about metadata and various options dealing with that, as well as whole page histories and section histories; this latter is not an "either/or" case. The team wants to figure out use cases and frequency, among other questions.

Note: ''This paragraph is merely conjecture and is not meant as a definitive direction or set of ideas. This is merely the team spit-balling based on the data collected and analyzed. The actual direction will only be formulated and set after Phase 2 discussions have taken place with communities.'' At this juncture it seems that Flow will not be the direction. For now, it seems the best approach might be to have a system whereby wikitext - for those who want to use it - will be an "under the hood" feature, accessible for more advanced users, with a "surface" interface more user-friendly for lay users or simply those that have no desire to use wikitext. Yet new features suggested by communities might break established conventions, so the team wants to make sure those trade-offs make sense via discussion with all communities. Even if there is a different overall interface, the thought is to make certain there is still a transfer of needed skills and abilities that users have pointed out are vital.

Previous
See updates from before May, 2019 at Talk pages consultation 2019/Status updates.