User:Whatamidoing (WMF)/DiscussionTools

This page introduces the work the Editing Team is doing with talk pages. They want people to instinctively recognize and use talk pages to communicate with other people on wiki.

This initiative is part of the Talk pages project. This is a large effort to help all contributors communicate more easily on Wikipedia. To accomplish this, the Editing Team follows the Talk pages consultation 2019 and existing community conventions. They want to incrementally evolve the visual appearance of talk pages. They will ensure backwards compatibility with the current experience.

Background
The Editing Team wants to evolve wikitext talk pages so that experienced contributors can coordinate their work and connect with other editors easily. They also want to help newer editors understand and use talk pages.

Junior Contributors need to discover that wikitext talk pages are valuable spaces to communicate with other volunteers. Senior Contributors need simple, quick ways to understand the conversations.

However, many volunteers have told the Editing Team that this is unnecessarily difficult. Specifically, user feedback,      usability tests,  the Talk Page Consultation (especially: #Newcomers, #Confusion, and #Design), and academic research have highlighted the difficulties people have reading and using talk pages:""Talk pages and their current configuration proved confusing...For [some] participants, it took more than 4-5 minutes to understand the Talk page itself which was “disorganised” making it “difficult to take part in the discussion.”" ""I don't know what it means really to start a new discussion. Because none of this looks like a discussion."" ""I often have trouble visually parsing long discussions on the WP:Help desk, for example. Sometimes, a discussion will involve three or more people and/or have five or more posts. Spacing between posts is not standardized, nor are signatures, nor is indentation, nor is the length of posts. Sometimes, people become confused and respond as if one person is the author of what another user has written."" ""I felt I had to scan the page a lot for what i needed, as different elements didn't really stand out. It wasn't really obvious that i was looking at a message from someone..."" The Editing Team wants to make wikitext talk pages easier for people to understand. They hope to:


 * 1) Help Junior Contributors quickly learn that talk pages are spaces to communicate with other volunteers,
 * 2) Help Junior Contributors find the tools for participating in conversations, and
 * 3) Help Senior Contributors quickly evaluate the level of activity happening on talk pages.

Strategy: "Crawl towards legibility"
The Editing team has already made some incremental and optional changes to help editors. These include:


 * replying to a comment,
 * starting a new discussion, and
 * subscribing to a topic.

Some of these new tools are available on the mobile web site.

They now want to make it easy to:


 * Recognize talk pages as space to communicate with other people
 * Identify and understand the conversations happening on talk pages
 * Know what to do to engage with talk pages

If you do not like these changes, you will be able to turn them off in Special:Preferences.



Approach
They will work to deliver the strategy in three phases.

It is important that the needs and expectations of Japanese speakers are heard and incorporated into the design process. They asked for opinions in Talk pages project/Usability/Prototype/ja. This was advertised with CentralNotice banners in Japanese for two weeks. You can still see the test wiki and share your thoughts.

Phase 1: Topic containers
First, they will change how ==Talk page section headings== look. They will introduce discussion-specific metadata within these headings.

"Discussion-specific metadata" in this context refers to information like:


 * the last time this conversation was edited,
 * the number of comments in the conversation, and
 * the number of unique people who have participated in the conversation.

More information can be found in T269950.

Phase 2: Clear affordances
Next, we will make the affordances for responding to specific comments and starting new conversations easier for people to identify and access.

This will change the appearance of the button for the Reply tool. The old button looks like this: [  ]. The new button could look like this:

More information can be found in T267444 and T255560.

Phase 3: Page framing context
In this last phase, they will introduce new whole-page elements, at the top of the page. They will help people immediately recognize talk pages as places where editors communicate. They will help people learn if a comment has been added recently. Some changes will only work in the new Vector 2022 skin. More information can be found in T269963.

This set of changes will include:


 * A visual space between the "namespace" and "page" name portion of a talk page's title.
 * An item at the top that describes, and links to, the latest comment on that page
 * An "Add topic" button that will appear in the sticky header Vector 2022 introduces (desktop only)
 * Information within the new table of contents Vector 2022 introduces about the number of comments within a section