Topic on Talk:Flow Portal/Archive2

User:Jorm (WMF) asked on Quora: What do you find confusing about Wikipedia's discussion systems? I'm moving my answer here so it's available on the open web.

Since perspective is important on this, here's where I'm coming from: I'm a long time (8 year) heavy user of MediaWiki (many different sites), most notably English Wikipedia; and I do a great deal of work with first-time and developing wiki contributors. So, my comments reflect both my own needs, and my perception of the needs of the people I teach.

Things that don't get discussed much, but are big opportunities for improvement:

• Links (to talk pages, to section headers of talk pages) do not persist through through archiving. Asynchronous, eventualist communication is one of the core strengths of wiki software; this is a major exception. (e.g., I link today to a conversation -- from Twitter, say -- but next month, that link goes nowhere useful.)
• It's difficult to provide context. Outside Wikipedia, most of my collaborative writing is in Google Docs; and the "comment" feature, where you highlight exactly the chunk of text you are talking about, is incredibly useful. I find myself missing the ability to easily point others to exactly what I'm talking about frustrating.
• There's no easy way to "search ahead" when typing somebody's username or other internal link. The HotCat extension has this capability; on Twitter and Facebook, when I type "@" followed by the first few letters of a friend's name, it starts to guess what I mean. A feature like this in MediaWiki would be hugely helpful.
• No "ping" notification. If somebody tags me in Facebook, I am notified; if somebody links my name in a Wikipedia discussion, there's no notification capability.
• Posting diffs can be a really important element of descriptive or persuasive discussion. A quicker and/or more intuitive way to find and paste a diff would be a big help.

Obvious/well-known issues with perceiving what is going on:

• When somebody comments on my user talk, do I reply on my own page or on theirs? There are pros and cons to both.
• When somebody replies to me, I'd like to be notified. "Watch list" is too general, expecting them to tell me on my own user talk is too onerous.
• Same as #2, but cross-wiki: multiple languages, multiple projects.
• Too-specific time stamps result in a whole lot of clutter. It's very, very rare that information about what precise time a comment was left is important to the discussion; if that information is preserved a click away (e.g. in edit history), it could be left out of the display in the context of discussion. Perhaps dynamically: for instance, anything more than 3 hours old suppresses the minutes and seconds, anything than two days old suppresses the time of day.

Obvious/well known issues with adding comments:

• I shouldn't have to think about whether/how much I am indenting…much less need to use markup to do so.
• I shouldn't have to remember to sign.

… I will try to come back and add to this. Thanks for asking!

This post is great. Thanks for putting it here, I would've never seen it on Quora. :-)

The great thing is, that Extension:LiquidThreads already has most of this features and works mostly great, even if some WMF developer think it's experimental, I'm using it almost stable since years!

This includes most of the points that annoy me about the current discussion "system" in mediawiki. There are a few things that I would add, though:

• Thread-independent management. Have each thread be a single entity would allow watchlisting only the topics you care about, moving threads to more appropriate pages, and archiving without losing edit history, or, if archival is done via moving the page to preserve the edit history, without having to split the page at unnatural places (e.g. if organizing archives by year, the first posts of a still active thread near the end of the year will have to be copy-pasted back to the current page, losing history; if organizing archives by number of threads, reactivating a prematurely archived thread would require manual copy-paste and loss of history)
• Native support for quoting. This is especially relevant for long messages, since inserting replies below parts of the original post break its flow and make it unclear who is writing what, and quoting templates are a hack that can't, for instance, link reliably to the original post being quoted.
• Features for consensus-making. Wikipedia discussions can get quite big and it would be great to have a way to provide summaries for threads, and voting for individual posts, so people who come across a long discussion don't have to read the whole thing to make sure they're not repeating a point already made (and potentially addressed/resolved), or overlooking important points that should be taken into account. Voting would also make it easier to ignore low-vote posts if one's short on time, and allowing the best posts to be highlighted would even allow some form of summarizing to the thread.
• Automatic signatures. Not only the tildes markup is unintuitive, it's also very easy to forget to sign, even for experienced editors.