Topic on Talk:Talk pages project/Flow

Hi y'all – the Editing Team has noticed and experienced how helpful it can be to link to specific talk page comments.

With this in mind, the team wrote an experimental gadget that enables you to link to specific talk page comments in one click.

Trying the gadget

1. Visit your common.js (to enable on one wiki) or global.js page (to enable on all wikis)
2. Insert the following snippet on a new line:

   mw.loader.load( 'https://meta.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=User:ESanders_(WMF)/commentlinks.js&action=raw&ctype=text/javascript' );
   

   and publish.
3. Visit a wikitext talk page (e.g. Talk:Talk pages project/Usability)
4. Notice the following appears after each comment's signature: [ link ]
5. Click a [ link ]
6. Notice the link to that comment has been automatically copied to your device's clipboard
7. ✅ That's it!

Notes

1. As with all gadgets, this software is experimental and is known to break in some cases. E.g. if and when a comment is moved to a different page, the link will no longer function.
2. This gadget is made possible by the parsing algorithm the Editing Team engineers (@Esanders (WMF), @DChan (WMF), @DLynch (WMF), and @Matma Rex) designed and implemented to make it possible for software to understand talk pages' structure.

If you end up trying the gadget and have feedback to share about it, we would value you sharing that feedback with us here.

Thanks! A couple of thoughts:

• It uses whatever URL I’m currently visiting instead of the canonical one. E.g. if I click a [link] link on https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Talk_pages_project/Usability&diff=prev&oldid=4980264, I get https://www.mediawiki.org/w/index.php?title=Talk:Talk_pages_project/Usability&diff=prev&oldid=4980264#c-Tacsipacsi-2021-12-24T14:46:00.000Z-Klein_Mu%C3%A7i-2021-12-24T13:44:00.000Z instead of the expected https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Talk_pages_project/Usability#c-Tacsipacsi-2021-12-24T14:46:00.000Z-Klein_Mu%C3%A7i-2021-12-24T13:44:00.000Z.
• I’d like something like [ reply | link ] better than the current [ reply ] [ link ].
• When I click a [ reply ] link, it becomes invisible but its placeholder is still there, so there’s unexpected blank space before the [ link ] link.

Thanks for the feedback.

1. Good spot, fixed here
2. Yeah - that section was designed to expand like the [ edit | edit source ] links but as this is a gadget it was easier just to clone it.
3. The reply link keeps its width to avoid a reflow of the page and a potential vertical jump. You're right that this looks odds when there are extra tools so that would need to be considered if this was made into a proper feature.