Talk pages project/New topic

This page talks about the Editing Team's work to improve contributors' workflows for starting new discussion threads on talk pages, across Wikipedia's 16 talk namespaces.

This new workflow for starting new conversations is intended to make it more intuitive for Junior Contributors to initiate conversations in ways other contributors can easily engage and help Senior Contributors do the same with less effort.

This initiative sits within the Talk pages project, our teams larger effort to help contributors, across experience levels, communicate more easily on Wikipedia using talk pages. To accomplish this, we are building upon the Talk pages consultation 2019, and existing community conventions, to evolve existing wikitext talk pages.

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


 * Share and invite feedback on designs
 * Announce deployment plans
 * Share data about how the feature is being used

Status updates
This section contains updates about the project's development.

27-March-2020
Usability testing of existing experience


 * To ensure the designs we create meet the needs of newer contributors seeking to talk with other people on Wikipedia, we are running a series of usability tests of the existing "start a new discussion thread" workflow.
 * You can expect to see the research findings posted by mid-April, in the Usability testing section below.

Open questions
This section contains questions the team would value your input on.


 * 1) How do you typically go about starting a new conversation/section on a talk page? Does your workflow vary depending on the namespace? E.g. Do you start new sections on user talk pages differently than how you start them on article talk pages?
 * 2) Are there aspects about your current workflow(s) for starting a new conversation/section you find to be inefficient or limiting?
 * 3) Have you noticed others have difficulty starting new discussion threads?

Objectives
The improvements to the workflow for starting a new discussion thread on Wikipedia talk pages is intended to make it more intuitive for Junior Contributors to initiate conversations in ways other contributors can easily reply to and to help Senior Contributors do the same, with less effort.

We think helping contributors start conversations more easily and with less effort will increase the likelihood these contributors receive the input and guidance they are seeking from others.

It is important to note that making it easier and more accessible for people with less experience contributing to Wikipedia to start new conversations on talk pages could cause an increase in "unproductive" behavior. Accordingly, as this new tool is deployed, we will monitor the edits people publish using it to ensure they are not disruptive to others.

Evaluating impact
This section will contain the methods and data we will use to evaluate the impact of this feature.

Background
The Editing Team is committed to improving how contributors communicate about their work on Wikipedia, by making existing wikitext talk pages easier and more efficient to use.

A key part of the process of communicating with other contributors is starting a new discussion thread. Trouble is, as previous research and the Talk Page Consultation 2019 uncovered, contributors, across experience levels, find the workflow for starting a new discussion on talk pages challenging. Specifically, our research has found:


 * Junior Contributors do not sign their edits. When newer contributors do not sign the new discussions they start, they create more work for people wanting to respond. For in order for them to know who to address their response to, they need to navigate to a separate page (the talk page's history page). Additionally, when people do not sign their comments, others will miss out on the opportunity to quickly reply using tools like the new Replying feature.
 * Junior Contributors find the workflow difficult to discover. Many talk pages contain large yellow infoboxes. While these infoboxes are helpful for communicating the quality of an article, editing instructions and links to archived conversations, they, "...are so prominent they distract people from most important actions on a talk page (start a new topic, reply, edit, etc)." [ 1] Other research has shown newer contributors can miss the "New section" link altogether, clicking "Edit source" instead, causing them further confusion. [ 2]

Design
This section will contain proposed designs as well as an audit of the existing start a new discussion workflow.

Deployment
This section will contain information about how and where the Starting a new discussion tool will be deployed.

Usability testing
This section will contain information about usability testing the team conducts to ensure the revised experience works in ways contributors expect and need it to.

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
 * Talk pages consultation

Glossary
The Talk pages project glossary 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.