Talk:Talk pages consultation 2019/Phase 1 report

Please find your name in this report
Hello, Akela NDE, Alexis Eco, AlvaroMolina, Andrzej19, AntonyB, Barcelona, Chnutz, Ciell, Designer1959, Dimaniznik, Edgouno, Enyavar, Fanaliceful, Floflo, Flugaal, Frigory, Geonuch, Grasyop, Gżdacz, H7, Jaluj, Jamain, Jckowal, Jeblad, Jpgibert, Jules78120, Lamiot, Liquendatalab, Louis H. G., MarioFinale, Matthiasb, Nattes à chat, Neitram, Niridya, O. Morand, Oleg3280, Oscar ., Pamputt, PaulSch, Reem Al-Kashif, Retired electrician, RonnieV, 百無一用是書生, Sumek101, Thieu1972, Tortliena, Tximit, Vriullop, Wargo, Wiesios, Wikilover90, Yellow Horror, Yodaspirine, Zellmer, そらたこ, リボンちゃん, and 無聊龍:

You have been quoted in this report. Please find (Ctrl or Command) your name in the report. Some people were quoted more than once. Please tell me if the translation is not good. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:12, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Also Waldir, (from Flow/Research/Experienced User Responses) and Kippenvlees1, Prométhée, and Tom (LT) (from the 2019 Community Wishlist Survey on Meta): Your comments, from previous relevant discussions, are quoted in this report. I'm pinging you in case that might be surprising. Whatamidoing (WMF) (talk) 20:22, 17 May 2019 (UTC)


 * Fixed minor errors. Feel free to edit if necessary. Jeblad (talk) 20:46, 17 May 2019 (UTC)

Some thoughts
For the most part, I'm rather indifferent at this stage as it's high-level planning rather than specifics. But I do have some thoughts. HTH. Anomie (talk) 20:51, 17 May 2019 (UTC)
 * I see several mentions of "new buttons" for accomplishing things, but no specifics of how those buttons would work.
 * If you're creating new special pages (like Special:MovePage) or index.php actions (like action=edit and action=history) for manipulating "threads" and such, keep in mind that your MVP must include ways to accomplish everything via the Action API as well.
 * If you're creating your new features using JavaScript, I'd guess that'll already be using the Action API. But remember that many of our users use browser extensions like NoScript or otherwise disable JavaScript and would like to be able to continue using talk pages. It's ok if the experience isn't as convenient (e.g. they may have to manually type some wikitext and remember ~ on their own), but they should still be able to accomplish everything.
 * As much as possible, make sure that someone (or some bot!) who uses the old syntax doesn't break everything. For example, if you introduce some new syntax for headings and someone adds a section using the old syntax. At the same time, forbidding the old syntax would likely be counterproductive.
 * Remember that major changes to the syntax go against #Stability. Switching from colons/asterisks for indentation to some new character would be less disruptive than wrapping every comment in XML-ish tags. Normal "==" headings would be less disruptive than some new syntax for headings, even "=/="; on every page I'm aware of, "a discussion" is almost always indicated by the same level of heading, so all you might really need is some way to know that e.g. each separate discussion on w:en:Wikipedia:Templates for discussion/Log/2019 May 16 is the "====" level rather than "==".
 * At least on enwiki, people do sometimes use the Wikipedia_talk pages of Wikipedia-namespace discussion boards to separate discussion about the board itself from whatever topic is supposed to be being discussed on the board. While in my experience the meta-discussion tends to be infrequent, expect pushback if you try to force all boards to move to Wikipedia_talk. The wikitext magic word (like the existing  magic word that adds the "add topic" tab) strikes me as more likely to be accepted.
 * Regarding per-page history versus per-discussion history, I personally would prefer to keep the per-page history as that's how I keep up with discussion boards.
 * Regarding moving the top-of-page templates, I'd expect pushback on that one along the lines of "if you hide them somewhere else, no one will ever see the important information!". Likely no matter how objectively useless the information actually is to a newbie trying to use the talk page.

Once upon a time…
I was involved in a project to replace a really ancient and crappy system. We were trying to rebuild the system, to create something better and more usable. It should even have a graphical user interface! After several year the system emerged. Strangely, it had all the bad interaction gadgets, but now the exact same weird handles were recreated in the graphical user interface. The users still typed the actual numeric action codes. What had happen? We did one major error, we asked expert users what they wanted. Everybody thought they know best how to make an efficient system, but what they did was to recreate a system with all the original flaws because the did know how to work around those flaws.

The lesson learned; don't make an expert group of old users with bad habits. ;) Jeblad (talk) 21:44, 17 May 2019 (UTC)