Wikimedia sites will know very well the pains of managing discussion in a MediaWiki installation. Presently, like a lot of early MediaWiki, it’s a hacked together solution — make the discussion pages editable, add some niceties like signatures (with the date/time and user who made the edit), and a button at the top for creating a new section.
This kind of sucks. Really, we should be working on a system where discussion is managed like every other discussion on the internet since discussions have been done with web interfaces. We need threads and posts, we need replies and quotes, and we need automatic signatures, automatic archiving and paging, and all that jazz.
So my current assignment from Wikimedia is cleaning up an awesome extension for discussion threading called ‘LiquidThreads‘ with a view for deploying it on Wikimedia projects. Originally written by David McCabe, it gives us the regular forum-like interface, with a distinctively ‘wiki’ approach to discussion. I’ve put together a test setup, which I frequently update to the latest bleeding-edge version, for testing the latest and greatest improvements to the extension. Please try it out and give feedback!
Overview of the LiquidThreads interface
It differs from ordinary forum discussions in a number of significant and important ways:
- All posts are editable by anyone. To avoid abuse and confusion, we have “edited by author” and “edited by others” flags, to clearly show whose words are whose. And like any good wiki, each post has its own history page, so unwanted edits can be reverted.
- Once a thread has finished, wiki users collaborate on a “summary” of that thread, which explains what was discussed, what each side had to say, and what the result was. Once this summary is written, the thread is archived.
The LiquidThreads system can require a summary be entered for each thread prior to archiving
- Users can freely move threads from page to page without losing the associated history of the threads. While this would be restricted to ‘moderators’ in a traditional forum, there’s no reason not to make it easy for any user to move threads from page to page in a wiki environment.
Some of the advantages this has over regular ‘wiki-style’ discussion are:
- Archival is handled by the software. No clumsy bot implementations required.
- The enforced summarising will help with keeping track of all the discussions that have been had, and in managing the huge archive systems we use at the moment.
- The history of discussions will be far more manageable, being separated out into a different history page for each post and thread.
- Moving threads from page to page will be painless, and will move the full history of each thread along with it.
- It’s much prettier, and much easier to use than our existing system.
The LiquidThreads interface clearly shows which posts are in reply to which
- There’s much more scope for quoted, point-by-point replies (and this is part of my future direction for this extension).
- You can watch individual threads, which may give you email notifications for replies on pages or threads you care about. You can even just receive notification for replies to your posts.
Of course, the extension is still not quite there. Here are some future directions I’m hoping to take with LiquidThreads (subject, of course, to what the Foundation’s plans are for LiquidThreads):
- Adding some sort of capacity for quoted, point by point replies to other posts. These are a critical feature of any sensible structured discussion, keeping people on-track. It’s a shame we’ve waited so long to see them on Wikimedia.
- Allowing limited customisation of the signatures shown in the footer for each post, much as signatures are presently customisable in MediaWiki.
- General bugfixes, UI cleanliness, and other cleanup necessary for a full deployment on Wikimedia sites.
What do you think of the new discussion system? Have you tried it?
Let me know in the comments!
Nice! It would be super to have a better discussion forum.
questions: (I don’t know much about liquid threads, so forgive me)
In an ideal implementation, it seems like you’d want to be able to see the history of all the threads on a page, too — or is that totally impossible given how it’s written? I’m just thinking of experienced uses who often take a quick glance at the history to see what’s going on.
Would there be any way to sort threads by last modified OR date of first edit? I personally get confused when the order of threads in the ToC jumps around — right now if you edit something it looks like it jumps to the top? And the “last modified” date isn’t quite properly updating so it’s extra confusing.
What about some sort of “summarized” flag so when a thread is summarized it shows up in ToC as summarized? What does summarizing do, exactly?
I look forward to seeing this in action on a bigger wiki! Maybe we should deploy it on meta
Link | June 18th, 2009 at 12:44 am
Phoebe:
One of the sexier features is the “New Messages” system. I forgot to mention it in the post, but basically new replies to threads OR pages that you are watching (or your talk page) show up on ‘Special:NewMessages’. You can mark individual messages as read, or all of them at once. There’s some nice email notification in there, too.
Individual pages also have their threads sorted in descending order by last activity, so if you read from the top down you’ll see everything that’s changed since your last visit.
With that said, it might make sense to have some sort of dedicated history page for a particular page, showing when new replies have been created and so on.
That’s what the “oldest threads first” and “newest threads first” options are for
Yes, that’s a nice idea.
The point of summarizing is so that on the ‘archive’ page, there’s a brief summary of exactly what was discussed and decided in a thread. It shows up on this page (which I haven’t touched and needs a lot of work).
The general theory is that we will deploy it on test wikis, and then page-by-page on production wikis before switching all wikis to have it activated full-time.
Thanks very much for your feedback and questions!
Link | June 18th, 2009 at 12:55 am
I’m very much looking forward to seeing this added to wikimedia wikis, especially mediawiki.org.
I do support for my extensions on their discussion pages, and archiving and summarizing discussions is an absolute pain. I’ve actually given up on it. See the LDAP authentication extension discussion page; it is far too large.
Link | June 18th, 2009 at 1:02 am
MediaWiki’s current “discussion system” is definitely subpar, I think this extension would be great in helping out with that.
The table of discussions at the top should span all the way across the content area so that it doesn’t waste any space on the screen.
Also, clicking on a discussion in the table should show the section heading, too, rather than go straight to the first post (so that users can see the action buttons at the right).
Finally, I’m not sure if this is a problem with MediaWiki or the extension, but tabbing from the discussion title box sends the cursor to the search box, rather than the edit window.
Link | June 18th, 2009 at 1:16 am
Just a question, will there be any pure wiki-elements left in the talk pages? For example, we stick a lot of banners and notices on the talk pages of Wikipedia articles and these are not strictly “threads”.
Link | June 23rd, 2009 at 12:24 pm
Eugene:
Yes, every discussion page has a ‘header’, which is what you will edit to add banners and such.
Link | June 27th, 2009 at 3:30 am
The implementation of LiquidThreads at http://wikieducator.org provides a clean interface.. At this moment your implementation shows labels that should imho be hidden.
Thanks,,
GerardM
Link | July 4th, 2009 at 12:53 am
Hello. I have set up a discussion forum at http://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/HHF. I’ve done the forum watching mostly through categories and DPL.
Can you check the site out and post a comment at the talk page over there? Talk:HHF
I have a few questions, can the liquid thread be used as a forum? Like a phpBB3 forum with sub forums, hot topics and everything? If yes, how long will that development take?
Link | August 27th, 2009 at 3:59 pm
Hi Andrew,
I was referred to LQT after posting a message on Foundation-l; I’d like to hear your thoughts on the following:
Based on the question above I’m obviously not the only one that has considered that a Wiki-based solution could be used for forums/discussion boards, including as a plug-in for a blog like this one. In particular, it would be useful in situations where the potential of conflict and the need for behavioral norms are high as is the cost/complexity of moderation; the solution would be to distribute the moderation load among the participants and under the umbrella Wikipedia-like dispute resolution system. That requires a different approach than a WikiMedia extension, without the presumption of the existence of a Wiki article that the discussion occurs ‘behind.’ I think it would require a project all of its own for conducting debates, where the discussion IS the content, and for example might require a discussion page of its own to help manage it. Thoughts?
Link | September 25th, 2009 at 10:05 am
The link “test setup” goes to page with errors, it doesn’t work. Where is currently the best place to see LiquidThreads in action?
Link | December 13th, 2009 at 3:48 am
Your welcome everyone,
My computer worked not correctly, too much mistakes and buggs. Help me, please to fix errors on my computer.
I used Windows XP.
Thx,
Accuttnip
Link | December 18th, 2009 at 2:47 am