Talk pages project/Updates

This page is the best place to stay up to date about the Talk pages project.

The Editing Team will use this page to share information like:


 * Decisions that need to be made
 * Decisions that have been made
 * Progress about feature development
 * Open questions we are trying to answer

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9 September 2019: Wikimania
Members of the Editing Team were in Stockholm, Sweden to attend this year’s Wikimania. We arrived with a few questions in mind:


 * What are contributors' current experiences with Talk Pages? What could be improved?
 * How have the Foundation's past efforts to improve on-wiki communication impacted contributors?
 * What new questions will the team need to consider answering?

To help answer these questions, we engaged with Wikimania in the following ways:


 * We led a session in the Community Growth Space to share the Talk Page Consultation's findings and outcomes
 * We had casual conversations with contributors from around the movement
 * We met with the Foundation’s Parsing team to explore how wikitext syntax might be evolved to enable some of the improvements that surfaced in the Talk Page Consultation
 * We attended sessions relevant to Talk Pages throughout the three conference days

Below are our findings and notes from this year's conference...

After Flow: A new direction for improving talk pages
Description | | Q&A notes | Session recording (YouTube video)

Session overview:

The team led a session in the Community Growth Space to bring attendees up to date on what we've learned from the Talk Page Consultation and to discuss some of the decisions and tradeoffs we will collectively need to make to improve how contributors collaborate using talk pages.

Around 35 people attended the session who, generally, agreed talk pages need to be improved and were glad the WMF is prioritizing this work. With this said, some people expressed skepticism about whether the Foundation would follow through on completing the improvements we are proposing. More specifically, attendees were clear about how – in the past – the Foundation has promised changes to improve on-wiki communication and collaboration that have not been fully delivered (e.g., Flow).

The Q&A that followed the presentation was lively. People asked about the future of Flow and asked for more details about the improvements to existing talk pages. Notes from the Q&A portion of the session will be posted to the project FAQ. In the meantime, they are available in this Etherpad: AfterFlow session notes

Session takeaways:


 * 1) Communicate and follow through. We need to acknowledge we do not have people's full trust. We need to appreciate how the Foundation promised big changes with Flow and has not been able to deliver on all of them. In response, we need to make improvements more iteratively and communicate any changes about these plans early, often and thoroughly.
 * 2) Create spaces for conversations. During the Q&A, there were many questions we – the team – do not yet have answers to. Questions like: What improvements will be implemented? How will they be implemented? When will they be implemented? These are valid questions that need to be answered. They are also valid questions we do not yet have definitive answers to. In being open about not having all the answers, we noticed people in the audience started trying to help. This is exactly how we think this work needs to feel and flow...for us all to be asking and answering questions together, as partners. This interaction was a good reminder. It reminded us that we need to be intentional about creating environments where diverse groups of people feel invited to speak up. And we think this will partly depend on us continuing to be open about what we do and do not know.

Causal conversations
Following the team’s session in the Community Growth Space, an impromptu and productive feedback session happened with experienced contributors from Hungarian, German, Swedish and English Wikipedias.

Highlights:


 * Often times contributors are wanting to find the specific conversation where a decision was made about the content of an article, but that conversation is difficult to find. Being able to more easily search archived conversations could help this. This was something that came up in the Talk Page Consultation as well: #Searching.
 * Contributors who focus on helping newcomers learn Wikipedia observe newcomers write “everywhere” looking for help. One person suggested communication on the wikis be centralized to make a system that can be more easily understood by newcomers.
 * In relation to some of the criticism about unfulfilled promises, contributors generally agreed that an approach of incrementally developing features seems like a good idea.

Editing Team + Parsing Team
Background

Considering the direction that came out of the Talk Page Consultation is to build new features atop wikitext talk pages, it is important we start conversations with the Parsing Team early to understand what technical considerations will need to guide how the team designs and builds these new features.

Meeting details

At Wikimania, the team met the Parsing team to discuss what changes to wikitext ought to be considered in order to deliver on some of the changes that came up in the Talk Page Consultation. Changes like watching and being notified about replies to specific discussions, replying to specific comments and automatically appending signatures to content contributors post on talk pages.

To build features like this, the software will need to be able to effectively know where comments begin and end. One idea for doing this is introducing new wikitext syntax to make content on talk pages more "machine readable".

Takeaways


 * A number of syntax changes were proposed and are some are documented on Phabricator:
 * Parent task: T230654
 * A parser function for signatures to make them machine readable: T230653
 * Encapsulating multi-line comments: T230683
 * Automatic IDs for list items (comments): T230659
 * List item attributes (e.g. for thread IDs): T230658
 * The conversation surfaced some new questions we will need to answer:
 * To what extent do new tools need to be compatible with existing conversations?
 * More details: by "existing conversations" we mean: active conversations on talk pages and conversations that have been archived
 * Context: if we introduce new features that depend on new wikitext, these tools might not work with existing content that does not contain this new wikitext markup.
 * It is generally felt that the tools should work reasonably well with "existing conversations" but that it would not be essential to apply any syntax changes to existing conversations.
 * How does the software determine whether a page contains discussions or not?
 * Ideas: we could use a magic word to explicitly communicate "talk" on a page

All Talk? The effects of easier communication interfaces (than user talk pages) on collaborative production
Description

Session overview

In this session, researchers shared their findings about how Fandom's/Wikia's message wall feature impacted new editor behavior. The researcher's were specifically interested in understanding whether the feature's release led to an increase in the number of article contributions from new editors.

Takeaways


 * Presenter's conclusion: while the release of message wall* increased communication among all editors and newcomers, the feature decreased article contributions from new editors.
 * The Editing Team's takeaway: this study's findings helps validate feedback that was shared in the Talk Page Consultation and something the team has been mindful of ever since: making it easier for contributors to communicate does not necessarily mean people will make more contributions to articles.
 * It was interesting to see how this conversation about the relationship between communication and collaboration resurfaced among attendees of the team's After Flow... session. Here is a snippet of an interaction that surfaced on the session's Etherpad: After Flow Etherpad:
 * "It would be good to consider the tension between improving communication and collaboration on Talk pages vs impact on growth and contributions. There was a research session this morning where increased communication bt users on message walls in Fandom/Wikia saw *decreased* article contributions?"
 * "I think something like this really depends on what your ultimate aim with improving communication actually is ... I didn't see this presentation but there are more things to be done and communicated about on the projects than raw article growth. -foks"
 * "Agree. I think that's is part of the question the team posed "How do we measure collaboration?" - is it about making it easier for newcomers and experienced editors to communicate and make connections 'healthily' instead of getting into edit/revert wars (in which case less article contributions may be a positive sign of reduced conflict)"

*It should be noted, that Fandom's/Wiki's "message wall" feature is the equivalent of user talk pages on Wikipedia.