Topic on Talk:Talk pages project/New topic/Flow

What complications can you see there being from clicking on a red-linked talk page and seeing a page that looks like this?

Design of the initial talk page empty state design. More here.

One thought that comes to mind: for Senior Contributors who are wanting to add a template like en:Template:WikiProject_Biography to a new article, they will now need to make two clicks (1. Click red link and then 2. Click Create source) instead of one click (1. Click red link, notice the editor opens).

Clarification: people will be able to opt-out this experience by adjusting their settings in Special:Preferences.

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Context: we ask the above as we are working on the initial implementation of the empty talk page experience that is intended to ease the confusion Junior Contributors experience when clicking on a link to a talk page that has not yet been created. ^[1][2]

IMO senior contributors just want to get access to regular editing tools as seamlessly as possible, while juniors' expectations are based on social networks, which are often as immediate as directly typing your message in an already selected box and then confirming (single click/tap). So an introductory page or any kind of tutorial seems counter-intuitive in both cases.

Therefore my suggestion is to present empty talk pages as usual to senior contributors (based on user group and/or preferences), while juniors clicking on a red link don't get the full edit page but just the same box they get when they click "reply", so they don't even have to click a button to start editing and they're only presented the few tools they really need.

And, maybe, sysops should be able to customize the messages that appear above and below the edit box by user group, for example MediaWiki:Talkpagetext-junior would only appear to users who are not in senior groups or have not opted-out of the simplified talk page edit box, so they could be presented a simpler warning or anything else sysops think they should be presented.

I don’t think junior and senior contributors can programmatically be told apart: I consider myself a senior contributor, even when I edit a wiki where I have few edits so far, no extra groups and few to no changed preferences. Also a junior contributor may have a lots of edits, and may have changed quite some preferences (e.g. with the help of a first steps guide).

So maybe an opt-out option in preferences would work better because the system would assume you're a junior contributor unless you state otherwise.

Opt-out is already possible: you can turn off the New Discussion Tool (it’s not mentioned in the first PPelberg’s comment above, but it is in the linked status update). However, opt-out means that we still need to care about the probably many senior editors who haven’t opted out of the NDT.

I'm glad you mentioned this, @Tacsipacsi; I've updated the original post to note that people will be able to opt-out of the experience we are talking about here.

I can see issues with tools like Twinkle etc, which automatically post and create talk pages when handing out warnings.

I'm glad you called this out, @TheDJ. A resulting question for you and a comment...

Question: Would it be accurate for us to think Twinkle, and the other tools like it that you have in mind, use the API to save edits?

If Twinkle and these other tools do use the API, then they will be compatible with the experience we're designing.

Comment: If a tool uses the edit form to save edits then it may not be compatible. If a turns out NOT to be compatible, we think this could be fixed in a relatively straightforward way by having said tool add &dtenable=0  to the URL it uses.

I don’t know how DiscussionTools works, but it should probably handle only &redlink=1 URLs. Twinkle et al., in contrast, has no reason to append that to its URLs.

Overall, I like the new empty talk page message quite a bit. It's a lot more streamlined than the old one that used w:Template:No article text, which had way too much.

One situation to watch out for is talk pages that previously existed but were deleted—for those, information should be shown from the deletion log.

I also think there should be a different help page link for English—w:Help:Introduction to talk pages seems better than w:Help:Talk pages. I've suggested that change.

We appreciate you reviewing the experience and coming by to share this feedback, @Sdkb. Comments in-line below...

One situation to watch out for is talk pages that previously existed but were deleted—for those, information should be shown from the deletion log.

Great spot! I do not think we explicitly designed for this case. I've made a note in Phabricator for us to consider it.

Question: does this page contain the deletion log information you were wanting to make sure was represented within the empty state of talk page that previously existed and were deleted?

Overall, I like the new empty talk page message quite a bit. It's a lot more streamlined than the old one that used w:Template:No article text...

@JKlein (WMF) will be pleased to hear this.

Yep, the "02:11, 18 April 2012 Hazard-SJ talk contribs deleted page Talk:Cat communication (Mass deletion of pages added by 109.194.136.216)" is what I was referring to. There's probably a way to package it better, but the information is important (particularly for experienced editors, but also for beginners; if a page was deleted, there might be a reason not to create it that we should communicate). For talk pages, this is less important than for subject pages, since I can't think of too many cases where the talk doesn't just follow the subject page, but if you're thinking about eventually expanding this new feature to blank article pages, it'll definitely be important.

The text (and therefore the links) can be customized locally by any interface admin. Most wikis don't have any page about talk pages, so the default will probably have to be a help page on Meta-Wiki.

Overall I like the NDT but as a "senior" (how I hate this term) contributor I don't like the redlink experience. I know what talk pages are for, so I don't appreciate the extra step in the workflow in starting a talk page. Any way of bypassing it without disabling the entire tool?

Are you frustrated by the extra click more frequently on User_talk: pages or article Talk: pages (or some other namespace)?

Any, talk pages have the same function in any namespace.

I'm usually annoyed by not having the extra click for User_talk: pages, because when I visit a red-linked user's pages, I almost always want to see a script that runs on user pages, and not to create the page.

User talk are, for me, slightly more annoying than other namespaces, for the opposite reason, if I'm there it is normally to create the page; whether that is manually, Twinkle or something else.

If you're using Twinkle, it shouldn't create any extra clicks for you.

No it doesn't but manual creation does. The point remains the same though, the extra click is unnecessary for "senior" editors and some way of bypassing it is desirable.

This is another of those cases where I'm not so sure about that... "Don't ever change something to my flow unless I can disable it" is not a sustainable model for progress

On User_talk: pages, volunteer-me is usually trying to figure out how to "undo" the automatic opening of the wikitext editor, so I can see the non-existent page. (I default to the 2017 wikitext editor, which behaves a little differently here.) At the English Wikipedia, I rarely encounter a non-existent Talk: page. It has almost always been created with a couple of WikiProject banners in it.

Article talk pages are 50/50 for me between new and existing. User talk pages I'm not bothered, in most cases, about seeing the non-existent page first.

I had a look at your contributions to get an idea of the scale of the problem. I found (looking only at page creations this calendar year, not all edits):

• User_talk: pages – 72 created by script and 3 manual page creations
• Talk: pages for articles – 5 pages created to add banners (I use a script for that)
• Draft_talk: page – 1 page manually creation

That's about 90% script-based and 10% manual page creations. Do you think your numbers are typical for experienced editors?

Probably about right, vandal fighters might have a higher script based %.

Volunteer-me had a lower script-based page-creation percentage, but I forgot to write down the numbers yesterday, and now I can't remember them.

On an absolute scale, you're creating an average of one talk page per month manually, and I think I was manually creating one talk page every couple of months.