Design/Archive/Wikimedia User Interface/Concepts/Discussions

The following is a concept by User:TheDJ. Enhancing, commenting, creating mockups and forking is encouraged !

Some notes and observations on discussion technology:

• Discussion needs participants (Help desk, tea house, forums, Facebook groups work)
• Talk pages are a terrible way of reaching an audience. (Note how many people are posting to ask for help on talk pages (as we ourselves advice them to) and then go months without an answer).
• Talk pages are a great way of focusing and sandboxing discussion
• Talk pages are great for collaboration amongst editors when working on an article
• Talk pages are great for discussing the wikitext of the article.
• A threaded discussion model is useful if a discussion goes into multiple directions
• A threaded discussion model can be confusing if there are many participants
• Live chat is awesome if you are collaborating or discussing with people on the spot.
• Live chat is terrible for complicated long term decision forming and archiving. It is too 'loose' and 'in the moment'.
• Talk pages are containers for article metadata

If we want to focus discussion on wiki and modernize them at the same time, then...

• Talk pages should be multiformat pages tying multiple elements together.
• Users should be able to insert multiple 'building blocks' into a talk page
• One possible block would be a metadata view (and editor)
• Another block would be a 'sandbox'/'draft' block. This block also allows for discussion but at the same time allows you to edit something like an article.
• Another block would be a discussion block
  • Discussions should be able to be represented on a talk page, simply by tagging it, or mentioning the article in the discussion on a forum.
  • A single thread might live in multiple places at the same time
  • Archiving a thread could be seen as tagging it with the title of an archive talk page, and removing the tags of the place where it was represented earlier.
• Another block could be a 'live discussion block' where users currently working on an article could interact with live chat.
  • archiving, policing etc of live discussions is going to be 'a thing'. This is potentially VERY dangerous (think of the children).
• Notifications are SUPER important.
• Forums are super important, as they are a good entry point to a larger audience.
  • Forums require a lot of maintenance options, to keep a forum usable.
    • Moving threads
    • Tagging threads
    • Moderation
  • Forums are just a collection of 'interaction' blocks
  • The most common could be a threaded discussion block
  • Another could be a wikitext interaction block (this helps close the gap between existing interaction models and future interaction models)
  • Another interaction block could be a 'consultation'.
    • This element would be a discussion block with additionally a summary.
    • This element can be 'closed'.
    • This element could have a 'poll'
• It should be possible to convert a block from one mode to another...
• Implementing just some of this and not the rest is totally pointless and ends you up with Flow.... :)