Topic on Talk:Talk pages project/Flow

Tracked in Phabricator
Task T293962

T297990: Clarify of "Enable quick topic adding" setting

Is there anyway to use discussion tools, but not have it hijack the process of creating new talk pages? When the url has ?redlink=1, the user trying to create a new page now has to go through extra steps to create the page using the standard editor.

@Xaosflux: good question.

You can restore the process for creating new talk pages I think you are referring to by disabling the New Discussion Tool.

To disable the New Discussion Tool, please do the following:

1. Visit Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing
2. Scroll to the section titled Discussion pages
3. "Uncheck" the checkbox next to the setting named Enable quick topic adding
4. ✅ Visit a talk page that has not yet been created and notice the experience you are likely used to has been restored

Note: the instructions above assume you have your interface language set to English.

That works but I don't want to disable the new way of starting a section - I like it, particularly the easy way to ping people. That's fine. Please uncouple that new page prompt from this checkbox - add another checkbox to allow bypassing it. And preferably link it to the prompt itself, it needs a simple 'don't show it again' checkbox, problem solved.

Yes thank you, we got that far. the discussiontools-preference-newtopictool-help message could possible be improved. It suggests that it will just add a feature, not replace a feature. (possibly something like: "This will show you an inline form for adding new topics; replacing the standard editor when creating new talk pages or adding new sections.")

Ah, I see – thank you for clarifying this, @Xaosflux.

Note: we'll work to improve the language/"helper text" that appears beneath the "Enable quick topic adding" setting to make it more clear the impact it will have in T297990.

Please allow easy opt-out, this adds an extra click to my new page patrols for adding asessments. See https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Village_pump_(technical)#How_can_I_get_rid_of_this_%22Start_a_discussion_about_Pidlashuks%22_prompt?

Update:

The Editing team is talking about an on-screen notice to tell people that there's a new thing, and go here to turn it off. This isn't available yet (it's still in the design phase), but it could be available in a few weeks. They're calling this idea the "hint".

I'm curious whether you two think that a one-time hint will be enough.

I think that sounds like an OK idea, but doesn't preclude improving the preference label to make it clear that turning one thing on turns off something else.

Getting back to this: Which preference label are you finding unclear? The one in Beta Features (multiple tools in one tickbox) or the one in the Editing section (one tickbox = one tool)?

@Whatamidoing (WMF): If the Beta features "Discussion tools" is enabled, then in Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing a new option appears "Enable quick topic adding". While this does say what it says it will do, it doesn't say that it is taking over the normal newpage workflow. See suggestion for label improvement as we have localized on enwiki: here Xaosflux (talk) 22:29, 13 December 2021 (UTC)

Would you mind tweaking that? Any of these would be grammatically correct:

• This will show you an inline form for adding new topics, replacing the standard editor when creating new talk pages or adding new sections.
• This will show you an inline form for adding new topics; it replaces the standard editor when creating new talk pages or adding new sections.
• This will show you an inline form for adding new topics instead of the standard editor when creating new talk pages or adding new sections.

Sure (did #2) of course that is only localized on the English Wikipedia - it would need to be updated upstream to make that useful for other projects.