Are there any statistics on how much the number of comments on any wiki increased or decreased after enabling DT? I know that this can be difficult, but it is very interesting :) Maybe you have already collected these data.
Talk:Talk pages project
As I understand it, Structured discussions can currently be enabled per page. Discussion tools, in contrast, is implemented as an opt-in view for each user. Is there any way to make Discussion tools effective per page instead of per user?
If the user has not enabled the beta feature, then there's no way to make them see the new tools.
If you don't see the tools despite enabling the beta feature, you probably can add the __NEWSECTIONLINK__ magic word to the page. In MediaWiki it adds the "Add topic" tab next to the "Edit" tab, and we use it as a hint that the page is a discussion page and should have the tools.
Also, each wiki can be configured so that the tools are opt-out instead of a beta feature. You could get that done if you want everyone to see the tools.
If you are sending people to a particular page, then you could change the link they're using, e.g., to https://de.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_Diskussion:Kurier?dtenable=1
I have indeed done just that, thank you! I discovered that query string solution buried in a Phabricator ticket.
Hello, all,
The final A/B test for DiscussionTools is underway, and it is likely that it will meet all of its metrics.
Assuming that it does, the Editing team will be planning deployments. I would like to encourage editors to opt-in early, instead of waiting for the deployments. Towards that end, if you speak a language other than English, please see:
and add or proofread your favorite languages.
I've been continuing to receive the "topic X was archived or removed" notification for edits like this page blanking. These edits happen all the time, and they're generally quickly reverted, but they're a lot more annoying when they now generate notifications. Notifications from them are nearly as frequent as notifications from actual archiving, so this is a significant issue that I really hope you all prioritize resolving before DiscussionTools leaves beta, @ESanders (WMF)/@PPelberg (WMF).
My suggested approach would be that, for any edit that has the "Possible Vandalism" tag (like in the example) — or perhaps any removal at all that's a blanking, or that's made by a human editor rather than a bot — you build in a delay (say, 24hr), and only send the notification if the edit is not reverted after that period. This would substantially reduce the number of spam notifications. I also see little downside risk for legitimate removals — by definition, a topic being archived has become stale, so a slight delay in the notification is unlikely to be an issue.
Upvote, leaving the beta without addressing this problem of Wikipedians usages could nip the tool in the bud. And I don't really want to try to convince people to use DiscussionTools like I tried with Flow after a failed start!
Do we even need to notify users if a bot is removing a section? The role is usually given by community consensus, so abuse (hiding a discussion, for example, out of specific malice) should be virtually impossible or negligible.
The delay of 24 hours is not a suitable solution, I think.
I guess these reviews could count for T316163.
I have actually grown to like the notifications for bot archivals of topics, since it's a way for me to catch unresolved things. E.g. I'll start a thread asking a question, no one will reply, and when I get notified that a bot has archived it I'll realize I need to follow up elsewhere.
Funny, cause I am here wanting to disable this subfeature because archiving bots are spamming me! Imagine being the staff team trying to answer both of our needs. 😝
@Lofhi the fetaure can be disabled in your notifications preferences under "Talk page archiving".
@Sdkb these seem like sensible suggestions for a phabricator task. At the moment the notifications are triggered by the blanking edit, so building in a delay would not be a trivial fix. Filtering out blanking edits would be simpler, but we'd need to check that this convention applies to all wikis and situations.
For my case, I don't want to turn it off, but it would be could to turn off notifications caused by bots!
@ESanders (WMF), feel free to add me as a subscriber on a Phab task, or let me know if I should create it myself.
@Lofhi, could you clarify what sorts of removals you would want to be notified about? Automated bot archiving and (generally spammy) manual removals are the only two types of archive notifications, at least that I've encountered.
@Sdkb yes, please create a new task.
(I am one of the active users of Farsi (fa) Wikipedia) Most of my activity is through the Wikipedia application, unfortunately the discussion tools are not available in the Wikipedia application and this is a negative and bad point.
I've run across an irritating bug for ~10 days now when I add a link. The correct path is:
- Type
[[to open the link dialog. - Type the name of the link.
- Press Return to select the correct page and close the link dialog box.
- Feel happy.
What I'm getting instead is:
- Type
[[to open the link dialog. - Type the name of the link.
- Press Return to select the correct page.
- Get a warning box (underneath the editing area) that says "You can press ⌘⏎ to submit your comment."
- Take hands off keyboard (grrr) and click the blue "Insert" button to close the link dialog box.
- Feel irritated.
See phab:T326500#9265496.
Mmm, yes. Thank you for saying something about this, @WhatamIdoing. And +1 to what @Tacsipacsi shared: we've got a fix for this issue that will arrive to en.wiki next Thursday (2 Nov) or the Thursday after that (9 Nov).
It'll be the 9th - the patch only wound up getting merged yesterday, so it'll be riding next week's train.
This is what happens when I'm not whining about these problems in meetings, right? ;-p
Sometimes, another contributor reply the exact same thing just a few minutes before me, making my reply useless or even annoying (if I ping an user). Example : :fr:w:special:diff/197452297.
When I submit a reply, I would prefer to automatically check if new reply has been submitted by other users and if there is, be asked for confirmation.
Support.
However, IIRC this suggestion has been made already and it has been discontinued to avoid confusion of less experienced users. Perhaps an expert mode for tough users would be required.
It is not obvious how the author should react when such message arrives, and they might discard and loose their entire edit now.
This already exists. If someone else replies while you're typing, you'll get a "Show new comment" alert. Clicking that will reload the page and highlight the new comments in that section. If the toolbar is still turned on in the Reply tool, it will even rescue the text you've already typed.
It won't catch 100% of replies (what if they other person clicked the button only five seconds before you?), but it should catch most of them.
The talk pages (on ENWP) now seem to include a lot of HTML comments containing Discussion Tools metadata even if I do not have the Discussion tools Beta gadget enabled.
- <!--__DTELLIPSISBUTTON__-->
- <!--__DTLATESTCOMMENTPAGE__{"id": ...
- <!--__DTCOMMENTCOUNT__2__-->
- <!--__DTAUTHORCOUNT__2__-->
Are these for short-term debugging or do they have a function?
If they have a function, can the comments be converted to attributes on existing DIV tags, so that user scripts can make use of them.
Are these comments still there?
Still
They are basically a debugging thing. We use these HTML comments as placeholders in the parser cache, then replace them just before rendering the page with interface elements in the correct user language. We don't clean them up if the relevant features are disabled, so that it's easier to distinguish when DiscussionTools is working but disabled, and when it's not working. We probably could though, as we've probably fixed all bugs like that a long time ago.
If you wanted to use this information in a user script, I would recommend using this API to fetch the metadata about the discussion: action=discussiontoolspageinfo&prop=threaditemshtml&excludesignatures=1&page=Talk:The_Fighting_Temeraire (and using Special:DiscussionToolsDebug/Talk:The_Fighting_Temeraire to preview them in a human-readable way).
I noticed that, with the recent fulfilment of phab:T263821, a feature was added that allows you to subscribe to any new discussions that are started on a talk page. This is super useful! I'm employing it at pages like w:WT:Teahouse (where I want to know about discussions about the Teahouse itself but not to be notified or have it show up on my watchlist every time someone asks a question).
However, there currently appears to be no way to keep track of which pages I've subscribed to new topics for. Given that this is a sort of quasi-watchlist feature (similar to incoming links, something we've long wanted), I'd find it useful to see a list of all such pages.
I would use this list to help identify possible additions (i.e. seeing the list might remind me of similar pages I'd like to add but haven't yet) and to more easily prune (i.e. I might notice pages I no longer want to subscribe to). Its presence would also be nice in the sense of reassuring me that I have control over my data should I ever want to use it (similar to how I appreciate the existence of w:Special:EditWatchlist listing all the pages I watchlist, even if I never use it other than to create a data backup every year or so); this might have GDPR-compliance aspects.
Would it be possible to create a special page listing all the pages I've subscribed to new topics for?
There's Special:TopicSubscriptions, which is linked from Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-echo.
Ah, that's exactly what I'm looking for! It's not particularly easy to find, but glad to know it exists. Cheers,
Is it possible to set bullets as a checkbox option for replying? Because some discussions (RMs and RfCs at least) get a lot of single replies to the same post, the preferred format is to open each reply with a bullet for ease of reviewing different editors’ comments.
Yes, I like to use a bullet in this way and so would use this option.
The Editing team has talked about this, but unfortunately I don't think it will happen any time soon.