Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions

How can the visibility of threads in Structured Discussions be controlled

7
Summary by ChristianKl

OTRS already seems to be a tool that can be used well for the use-case of user complaints that should have limited visibility.

ChristianKl (talkcontribs)

I'm currently in the process of writing the equivalent of BLP for Wikidata. As part of the process, I want to have a way where people can contact admins to request information about them to be removed when they think it violates their privacy.

Would it be possible to configure Structured Discussions in a way that only the person who started a thread and users with the admin flag can see a thread?

Yair rand (talkcontribs)

That sounds like a really bad idea. All active wiki content is supposed to be completely transparent. If something needs to be private, it should be off-wiki exclusively.

ChristianKl (talkcontribs)

My basic intuition is that it's beneficial to bring as much as possible on the Wiki. In this case, this likely means that the way of least effort involves telling people to go to the administrator noticeboard. Given that you are also a Wikidata admin do you have an idea about how you would like a structure to work that would be off-wiki for this use-case?

Yair rand (talkcontribs)

Many wikis use m:OTRS for things like this. The system seems to be very much built for handling sensitive information. Perhaps Wikidata could use the same system.

(Regarding it being beneficial to bring as much as possible to the wiki, I generally very strongly share that intuition. IMO, things like IRC, Phabricator, mailing lists, etherpads, etc all should be integrated into the wikis. Frankly, even code editing, Gerrit/Diffential, and the occasional WMF video broadcast should all be doable via wikis. But that's getting off-topic, I suppose.)

ChristianKl (talkcontribs)

Okay, it seems that OTRS is the right tool here.

Jdforrester (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Hey @ChristianKl,

That's an interesting idea, but it would be a pretty profound departure from the philosophical fundamentals of MediaWiki wikis, as @Yair rand points out. I'm not going to refuse outright, but we'd have to have a very serious conversation about such a feature before starting to build it (and building it would itself be very challenging given how much MediaWiki is built around that assumption; I'd vaguely guesstimate that building it would cost about US$250k and take half a year, but that might be a little optimistic depending on details).

If you really want this feature, I'd recommend that you should work with others who might be interested to work up a detailed plan for how such a feature might be developed whilst maintaining product compatibility as much as possible with the rest of MediaWiki, either on a page here or on Phabricator. Sorry this doesn't have an easy answer..

ChristianKl (talkcontribs)

Okay, that doesn't seem to be a reasonable amount of effort for the use-case.