Benoît Evellin
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How to built a discussion system that would ease user interactions and content creation on the wikis?
I believe that Structured discussions are a must-have for MediaWiki. Build such a system will reduce communication gap on the wikis, ease newcomers first steps, empower all users and allow powerful interactive tools to be built. It will also increase a lot the adoption of MediaWiki as the knowledge creator system. The MediaWiki community has a strategic priority decision to take on this topic.
The Wikimedia communities and organizations, through MediaWiki, wants to give everyone a way to create (free) knowledge collaboratively, for all users from everywhere. Imagine doing it without a powerful discussion tool that would face international interactions, scale and manage to keep everyone aware of the ongoing work. MediaWiki powered experiences have proven that it is not possible.
Unstructured messages are based on a blank page which hasn't evolved since 2002. You can do anything using a blank talk page. But Discussions as the are now don't provide basic things people are used to on social networks or Gdocs for example. Among many missing features, users can't reply to a discussion by email, or using mobile the interface; users have to know where to post and how to use a unique technical etiquette to discuss; and more. Current discussion default system is not welcoming everyone.
Several communities like Wikimedia and WikiHow create inventive ways to structure discussions a bit: templates, contents preload, mentions, surcharge of discussions with HTML, local scripts and botsâ¦. Those are not unified and supported by other than communities themselves. Some wikis have decided to use Flow and expect improvements to have a better experience. Some others communities, often the small ones, prefer to use Facebook or other social networks to discuss, which is not a free, safe and open environment.
The approach supported by the Wikimedia Foundation is Structured Discussions extension (re-scoped from Flow) to focus on user-to-user discussions. Consider that extension as a MediaWiki high-priority building block extension is a political decision the MediaWiki community needs to take. It will permit to build strong and diverse communities, decreasing technical barriers.
Built that discussion system requires a clear strategy and resources, like it has been done for the visual editor a few years ago. Any important effort will have side effects that will benefit to other projects (like VE project did notably by developing Parsoid), by being used by other extensions or services that would benefit discussions to create very powerful features, like in-articles notes or suggestions, or easier request systems.
Work on discussions on the Web is not a new topic. We can benefit of studies made about on-line discussions, both about UX design and technical implementation. The MediaWiki community also have some experience about what is not possible or not desirable, taken from LiquidThreads and Flow.
