Currenly, new topics get added below older topics. It would be optimal if this was reversed.
Topic on Talk:Talk pages project
Hi @HopelessNightOwl. I found your question very interesting, so I decided to do it. Go to w:User:Alexis Jazz/Bawl#How to install and copy/paste the mw.loader line to m:Special:MyPage/global.js. Go to a talk page and press a blue speech balloon. Open the settings (gear icon) and enable "Reverse section order (newest threads first)". Scroll down and save. Reload the page. Please do let me know if this has the desired effect for you, and thank you for the inspiration to add this feature!
Definitely not. A couple of decades of expecting new topics to be at the bottom can't be easily reversed, nor should it be.
The longstanding convention on Wikimedia sites is for new topics to be posted at the bottom, and I doubt that's going to change. However maybe it could be a config setting for other sites that want it?
Top-posting is the longstanding convention on the internet.
To understand the bottom-posting preference on the older Wikipedias, it's helpful to know what we started with. Back in the day – see nostalgia:Neutral point of view for an example – there were no talk pages at all. Discussion (and policies and everything else) happened in the mainspace articles, because that was the only option. Later, most discussion was moved to a subpage like nostalgia:Spacetime/Talk.
At the time, it was common to have a discussion and then replace the discussion with a summary of the decision ("Alice and Bob agreed that this article should include information about elephants").
In this model, bottom-posting makes a lot of sense. The top of the talk page/section works like a FAQ, and active discussions are at the end of the page. You can read the past decisions before you join the new discussions.
However, in 2022, it has two drawbacks that will be significant to some:
- It's inconvenient on a mobile device, especially when the page is long.
- It's not what newcomers expect.
Ah, mobiles. I can see that problem. Could do there be a fix, eg something at the top of the page to click to tale you to the bottom?
Perhaps a Table of Contents (with date of first post / date of latest post) would help?
HopelessNightOwl, I would be very interested in hearing what problems you have encountered with bottom-posting, or what problems you think could be solved by top-posting.
If some users are using AddNewSection as for the last two decades they will add at bottom, and if this tool starts to add sections on top if users are utilizing DT you will get an interesting structure within the page. Even more, those who are reading top sections only will never guess that there are recent topics on bottom, while those who acquired bottom sections will fly over top sections.
There are also multi-threaded talk pages, like Nominated for Deletion per Day in German Wikipedia at de:WP:LKH, where new entries are supposed to be added to the end, with the first proposal of the day in first position. Note the blue buttons. Later proposals might be related to the ones mentioned before.
I think it would make sense for §ion=new to post in the same part of the page, regardless of which tool you are using.
That would require new syntax to mark selectively such classical talk pages which shall follow the reverse sequence.
- A parser function or page switch is required to identify such pages for DiscussionTool.
- The AddNewSection functionality needs to be extended for that mode, best by automatic recognition of the first switch to avoid incongruent behaviour and requiring additional manual efforts to change all implementations on all such pages.
Please see German Village Pump and explain the effect on those headlines and TOC.
I don't think it would require new syntax. I think you would just have a moment of temporary but confusing transition. Perhaps you would schedule it for midnight on New Year's. Before then, you would have the old bottom-posting method of:
29 December–30 December–31 December, and then starting in January, you would have:
1 January––30 December–31 December, followed by:
2 January–1 January–31 December, and finally:
3 January–2 January–1 January.
Of course, it would be confusing if someone said that my page is special and must use the old style forever, because now you have to figure out which pages get which style, but a wholesale, complete switch for all pages would produce only temporary challenges (especially on high-traffic pages).
Did you ever try in a project of 10,000 active users with 10,000s of portals, local projects, request pages to convince them to change a two decades old method on all community pages?
- And necessarily on all article discussions, user talks, and template discussons?
- With 10 unresolved issues present on X-day in chronological order, but section 11 and more on top now?
- German Wikipedia has about 10,000,000 non-empty talk pages which are affected by your transition event, which mostly have more than one section and will need to be re-ordered. How long will a bot run take if server load does not permit more than one edit per 10 seconds per Wiki? I guess they are busy for several years. No X-day, not really.
Another interesting effect with classic order: Until after midnight some sections may be archived by bot and deleted, or somebody might insert a sub-section somewhere above, the &action=edit§ion=42 in URL will edit always the same section for answering.
- With on-top-AddNewSection the offered link to
§ion=42becomes invalid and confusing half an hour later, since that is now§ion=43. If you did not rebuild the entire page in your browser immediately before you answer, your village pump contribution will answer the wrong question. Oh, sorry, now it is§ion=44on saving, since between beginning and terminating typing a new issue became§ion=1. - Hope at least everybody recognizes that just answering in the wrong section.
If ever introduced, this may be used on a few pages within the Wiki which are prepared and announced to follow the New Order. And this will need a software marker to be detected by both AddNewSection and DT to distinguish between sequence request and set by bot after re-ordering the previous content. And since you cannot change an entire large project with all talk pages by turnkey from one minute to the other you will need to support both methods simultaneously for a longer migration period.
> Did you ever try in a project of 10,000 active users with 10,000s of portals, local projects, request pages to convince them to change a two decades old method on all community pages?
Yes, and so far it seems to be going pretty well. ;-) But I think you mean: Did I ever try to restructure millions of wikitext pages? The answer to that is "no".
I'm not sure that it would be necessary to restructure the pages. Yes, the old discussions would be in a different order. But high-traffic pages will sort themselves out via archiving, and I don't think it will matter for low-traffic pages. If you go to a page with three sections, and they are in the order of "3 – 1 – 2", it's still just three sections. You can still find everything on the page, even if the sections are not in order. It doesn't really matter if an article's talk page follows the order of "Book – Marriage – Links" or "Links – Book – Marriage".
It appears from the post at the top that it's possible to do this through a script, so it should be possible to make it a choice? I think you overestimate archiving as not all article talk pages are archived and I've seen some very long ones.
On a few highly frequented and archived pages it might be possible to reorder the appearance of independent sections via JavaScript.
- However, the physical order needs to be constant, especially the section numbering and the effect of
§ion=new.
I recall more sophisticated and controversial discussions over weeks looking like that:
== Some topic == === Severe objections === === Other viewpoint === === Reset this discussion and make a new starting point === === Conclusions === === Straw poll === === Follow-up === == Some other topic ==
If ever, sorting on top is the exception on some pages requesting that, but should not become standard behaviour on all talk pages from one day to the other, without migration of unarchived dozens of sections within a page, and re-education of some 10,000 wikipedians used to the other way.
@PerfektesChaos, there's no reason for the end user to care if the physical order is oldest first, newest first, diagonally or inscribed on cucumbers. There is no "physical" order anyway, it's all virtual. :-) My script option does four things: reverse all H1 sections, reverse all H2 sections without leaving their H1, make the new section form appear at the top instead of the bottom, collapse the TOC. The latter because if you enable this you probably want to minimize scrolling/start reading as quickly as possible. When a thread is posted the form is replaced with the preview, so the preview also shows correctly. H3/H4/etc sections and individual comments keep their original order exactly for the reason you stated. An individual Twitter thread is also oldest-first so this isn't out of the ordinary. It should help with the excessive scrolling issue on mobile devices in most cases, though some extremely long H2 sections are known to exist, luckily they are fairly uncommon.
"New to the top" is only at all valid if the ordering is implemented as a display option for the user. If the page showed a up/down button and allowed the time flow to be revered, then that might be acceptable. The posts would also need to show a valid timestamp as part of their heading so that a user could tell which way up everything was
@GhostInTheMachine, I'm not entirely sure what you mean. In case of my script, there is no up/down button, it's an option in its preferences. As a matter of fact, once the reversal is complete it currently can't be undone without reloading the page. What do you mean with the "heading of the posts"?
I don't think that Ghost meant to write quite so absolute a statement. Presumably he'd have no objections at all if a community chose to top-post on some or all of their pages. The English Wikipedia top-posts their AFD entries, and I'm sure that Ghost wouldn't want to change that just for the sake of making every AFD entry for each given day be posted in chronological order (example: the entry for Jabaco was posted at 01:39, 16 March 2022 (UTC) and is correctly above the entry for "Commit Media", which was posted 18 minutes earlier).
I cannot remember discussing this with Whatamidoing.