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

To receive a notification when new updates are posted, consider watching this page:



Summary
Over the past two weeks, the team has been working to:


 * Define the goals the team will strive to achieve with this project
 * Identify the first improvements to talk pages the team will work on
 * Work on technical proof of concepts for:
 * Programmatically identifying signatures on talk pages
 * Supporting autocomplete which could be applied to things like seamlessly pinging/@-mentioning a specific user while writing a comment

We need your help
A few questions came up in the course of our work that we would value your input on. If you have answers to any of the questions below, please say so on the talk page: Discuss 15 October 2019 update.

1. What templates and/or gadgets do you use most on talk pages?

Context: the team wonders whether these gadgets will give deeper insight into how contributors use and/or would like to use talk pages.

'''2. What non-Wikimedia projects/services do you think handle commenting/discussions well? Reddit? Discourse? Something else? What about these product(s) do you value?'''

Context: as the team begins to design the first set of improvements, they are curious to know what functionality you have found to be helpful in contexts similar to talk pages.

3. What do you type on a talk page when you want to notify someone in your post?

Context: the team is looking for conventions that might be specific to certain wikis. More information in this ticket: T234472

Project Goals
Follow along: T233888

This project is about enhancing on-wiki communication tools in an effort to improve how contributors work together.

As Phase 2 of the Talk Page Consultation puts it,

"Source"

It is with this in mind, that the team is working to define goals that honor that intention and a corresponding set of quantitative metrics they will use to track their progress towards achieving them.

First improvements
Follow along: T235285

For Talk pages to be valuable, contributors need to intuitively know how to participate in conversations.

Trouble is (as the Talk Page consultation and the team's research over the past couple of weeks uncovered) contributors, across experience levels, find replying to specific comments on Talk pages to be challenging.

Specifically, the team's research has found:


 * More experienced contributors find it difficult to locate the specific comment they are wanting to reply to when participating in long, multi-person conversations, within big blocks of wikitext.
 * Newer contributors report not being sure how to reply to a conversation, regardless of its length or complexity.

The team is now drafting specifications and beginning to develop designs for the first iteration of an enhancement that would make replying to specific comments on talk pages easier and more intuitive.

Technical research
The team is continuing the work on parts of the underlying architecture future features will rely on.


 * 1) Parsing signatures | Follow along: T232780
 * 2) * The team has an early technical prototype working that identifies signatures on talk pages.
 * 3) * This is an important part of being able to build features like replying to specific comments. See the last update for more context: 27-September Update.
 * 4) * The next phase of this work will involve enhancing the tool so it can "read" the dates and times included in signatures. Doing this, will enable functionality like showing contributors when posts/comments were made on talk pages, in their local timezone and preferred date format
 * 5) Text input for drafting a reply | Follow along: T234403
 * 6) * One of the first improvements the team plans to work on is a way for contributors to reply to specific comments on talk pages.
 * 7) * There are several components that will need to be designed and built to make this possible.
 * 8) * One of those components is a place (read: a "text input") to write a reply. Right now, the team is researching "text inputs" that have been built in the past to help inform their approach for doing something similar on talk pages in the near future.

Summary
The team has been, and is continuing to work on:


 * Design and product research: forming a better understanding of the most common talk page use cases and the opportunities for improvement within them.
 * Technical research: investigating existing gadgets and developing early proof of concepts for parts of the underlying technical architecture future features will depend on.

Getting involved
Do you have a question? Is there something you think the team could benefit from knowing? If so, please say something on the talk page: Discuss 27 September 2019 update

Design and Product Research
The team is working to form a more complete understanding of where and how contributors communicate on-wiki.

Right now, they are cataloging the most common use cases of article and user talk pages and the pain points and moments of delight contributors experience using them.

This work will help us to develop a roadmap. That is, an overview of the specific set of improvements we will propose working on and the order in which we are thinking about working on them.

You can see this work in more detail by visiting the following links:


 * Journey maps: this is where the team is creating visual representations of specific use cases, the steps that make up these use cases and the opportunities for potential improvements we see within them.
 * Research: this is where the team is cataloguing the use cases, design patterns and social conventions that help to make up "on-wiki communication."

Technical Research
The team is working on two parts of underlying architecture future features will depend on:


 * 1) Parsing signatures | Follow along: T232780
 * 2) * One of the biggest technical challenges of making improvements to talk pages is their unstructured nature.
 * 3) * Without a clear structure, it is difficult to build software that can do things like enabling you to reply to specific comments, receive notifications when someone replies to a comment you've made, receive notifications about a conversation you are interested in following, etc.
 * 4) * Right now, the team is developing a proof of concept to identify signatures on talk pages. Signatures contain important pieces of metadata like where a comment ends, who is speaking and the order in which people are speaking...information that is needed to build features like those mentioned in the bullet point above.
 * 5) Enabling in-line autocomplete | Follow along: T232601
 * 6) * Autocomplete can speed up how quickly you can express something by predicting what you are trying to type before you have finished typing it.
 * 7) * Right now, the team is developing the infrastructure to enable this kind of functionality on talk pages.
 * 8) * Functionality that could make it possible to seamlessly ping/@-mention a specific user while typing a comment on a talk page.

9 September 2019
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.
 * 3) More communication doesn't mean more collaboration. Attendees highlighted the relationship between communication and collaboration and how more of the former doesn't mean there will be more of the latter. To quote one attendee who put this well by saying there is a, "...tension between improving communication and collaboration on Talk pages vs impact on growth and contributions." The full context of this exchange is posted here.

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:
 * Person A: "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?"
 * Person B: "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"
 * Person A: "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.