Has there been any thought about using the new talk page tools (Talk pages project) on this wiki?
Topic on Project:Village Pump
Kind of - see Topic:Wq5fsfui1dlcxvk4. I don't know/remember what the outcome of that discussion was though, @Whatamidoing (WMF)?
The [reply] tool is on by default for all wikitext-based talk pages. I've asked the Editing team in the past to turn on the DiscussionTools Beta Feature by default.
Is your real question closer to "Has there been any thought about making wikitext be the default page model for talk pages on this wiki?" I don't think I would recommend that until we know whether automatic topic subscriptions (the [subscribe] button) is a good thing to enable by default for all users.
That really was my question and I appreciate the feedback.
The page model was originally switched to Flow because the admins kept getting so many requests for "one-off" changes to new pages. It proved to be less work to change the default and freely grant one-off changes back to wikitext (ask any admin you know, or start a thread here whenever you want; if the page doesn't already exist, it's not considered a big deal, and Flow-to-wikitext conversions are possible).
Editing's planning an A/B test for Talk pages project/Notifications. It will hopefully emerge from instrumentation purgatory at the end of this month, run for about a month, and spend another month while the analyst figures out what happened. Depending on the results, the Editing team will make a recommendation. My guess (but data rules) is that they'll suggest enabling automatic subscriptions for newbies and manual subscriptions for old hands. My second guess is automatic for everyone, but with a highly visible opt-out button, which would have to be built. (Also, by this point, it'll be August, which means Wikimania, and nothing else will happen for weeks.)
On the assumption that the local community would first want to have this information plus (assuming the results are favorable) have the [subscribe] button deployed, I think the very earliest that people would want to talk about any changes would be September (October or even November being more realistic, since everything takes longer than it should).
As for the Editing team's role: They'll provide information and recommendations to all WMF wikis, but they weren't consulted on the switch to Flow in the past, and I don't think they expect to be consulted on any switch away from Flow in the future.
I support enabling DiscussionTools here, and moving away from Flow. Thanks.
Update: The devs have accepted my proposal to enable DiscussionTools here, by default, for everyone. This will happen on Wednesday, when they have a backport window reserved for some other things anyway.
I believe the goal is that phab:T311456 will add to previous deployments to end up with the result that everyone has everything by default, and that logged-in users can turn off any pieces they don't want in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing-discussion. If there are problems, of course, please let me know.
Please have a look at User talk:Whatamidoing (WMF), which is showing the latest (but not final) version.
I also support enabling DiscussionTools here, and moving away from Flow. Thanks.
Filed phab:T325907.
Why would we do this? Structured Discussions is much easier for newcomers to use than DiscussionTools, especially on this wiki where most people are new and are coming here looking for support for their wiki... You also can also easily edit your responses in Structured Discussions compared to DiscussionTools.
I respectfully disagree, Flow has much more issues than DT. For example search practically doesn't work in flow so you can't really search for old questions (at least last time I checked). DT is also much more newcomer friendly once the new design for DIP gets deployed. I agree editing your response is a good idea to have but it doesn't mean it won't be there in near future. Also flow is a maintenance nightmare. e.g. my bot can't properly do any archive of even non-flow pages because it can't create new archive pages and I have to manually create them (e.g. Talk:Reading/Web/Desktop Improvements/Archive9)
For example search practically doesn't work in flow so you can't really search for old questions (at least last time I checked).
For most questions I've personally had regarding MediaWiki, I always use Google to look them up, never the wiki. That way I can get results from Flow posts on this wiki or Stack Overflow. Searching the wiki sucks outright even if we're using DiscussionTools. Search engines are able to index Flow perfectly and I'd guess that's where most others do their initial searching of questions as well.
DT is also much more newcomer friendly once the new design for DIP gets deployed.
Still not as newcomer friendly in other regards though. New topics in Flow are posted at the beginning of the page, the new topic creator is clearly at the top of the page and not a small "Add topic" button in the upper right, users aren't confused what happens to their topic when it becomes "archived", and you can easily mark the topic as resolved.
Why should we remove the opportunity for users to use these features when we don't need to? Until DiscussionTools has these features and more, then that's when we should consider switching systems. We shouldn't go through the work of switching systems right now when there's no net benefit of doing so.
This isn't some "newcomer" wiki. The people you're describing are ambitious enough technically that they can setup their own mediawiki but easily confused enough that they can't use Discussion Tools which has had fairly extensive user experience testing? I'm sure that's a real person who exists but I also don't know that mediawiki needs to be organized around them rather than other types of people who use this wiki. And it does things that would be confusing for newcomers too. For instance if hit reply to your message @Lectrician1. But it doesn't thread in a way that someone with forum or reddit experience would expect.
I think Project:Support desk actually benefits from having Flow enabled, since it's a pretty busy discussion page.
However, all other spaces probably should default to the new talk page tools.
My opinion: StructuredDiscussions is markedly inferior to the previous ("classic") system: imposing a lot of bloat I care little for. I am neutral towards DiscussionTools, but I guess it has the advantage of not being StructuredDiscussions. CapnZapp (talk) 16:42, 6 January 2023 (UTC)
It seems to me like this is a trade-off between making this wiki more accessible to third-party MediaWiki users (using Flow), and making it more accessible to other Wikimedia wiki users (using DT). Most of us are in that second group, so that's what we prefer, but one could reasonably prefer the other.
Maybe the answer is to make it easier to enable/disable Flow on individual pages. On the other hand, I'm sensing a desire to decommission Flow entirely, so that might be giving its fans false hope.
It seems the natural compromise here is to disable flow for default (at least for now) but keep newcomer facing page as flow boards. It makes sense a newcomer might want to discuss something in Project:Support desk and flow would be useful but if that person wants to discuss something like advanced linter error issues, I assume they at least know how to use a talk page.
If that's technically possible yes that seems like a good compromise.
Agreed that switching Flow off by default while leaving it enabled on some specific pages is a reasonable solution, and appears to be technically possible.
This was done in gerrit:871286.