User:PPelberg (WMF)/Sandbox

Talk pages project/Mobile
This page includes information about the work the Editing Team is doing to improve the experience people have using talk pages on the mobile site.

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 incrementally evolve the visual appearance of talk pages in ways that ensure backwards compatibility with the current talk page experience.

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 these features' use and impact

10 January 2022
The Editing Team is currently

Objectives
This work to improve the experience people have using talk pages on the mobile site is intended to cause:


 * 1) Junior Contributors to immediately recognize talk pages as places to communicate with other volunteers.
 * 2) Junior and Senior Contributors to be able to intuitively and with greater ease:
 * 3) Respond to something someone else has said
 * 4) Start a discussion about something new
 * 5) Know when someone is saying something relevant to them

Design
This section will be filled with the designs of the three interventions mentioned in the Strategy and approach section above.

Background
The Editing Team is committed to evolving wikitext talk pages in a way that gives experienced contributors more leverage to coordinate their work and connect with other editors, while making the same communication and coordination practices and capabilities legible and intuitive for newer contributors.

For these wikitext talk pages to be valuable, Junior Contributors need to intuitively recognize them as spaces to communicate with other volunteers about improving the wiki and Senior Contributors need to be able to spend minimal effort understanding the conversations happening on a given page.

The trouble is, volunteers across experience levels report the current presentation of wikitext talk pages can make recognizing talk pages, and deciphering the conversations happening within them, unnecessary difficult.

Specifically, user feedback     , usability tests  the Talk Page Consultation (see: #Newcomers, #Confusion, and #Design), and academic research have highlighted the difficulties people have reading and using talk pages:

History
Many projects, conversations and research 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.


 * https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Template_talk:Fig/sandbox
 * Custom section calls to action at it.wiki: Wikipedia:Bar/2021 04 14
 * People using custom CSS change how talk pages appear: https://global-search.toolforge.org/?namespaces=2%2C4...
 * Convenient Discussions
 * reply-link
 * Flow satisfaction survey
 * Moderated Testing, November 2014: talk pages and Flow
 * Talk pages consultation