Comments on: Discussion threading on Wikimedia sites with LiquidThreads

By: Accuttnip

Accuttnip — Thu, 17 Dec 2009 16:47:40 +0000

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

By: kassoe

kassoe — Sat, 12 Dec 2009 17:48:02 +0000

The link “test setup” goes to page with errors, it doesn’t work. Where is currently the best place to see LiquidThreads in action?

By: Jonathan

Jonathan — Fri, 25 Sep 2009 00:05:58 +0000

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?

By: Dharav

Dharav — Thu, 27 Aug 2009 05:59:40 +0000

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?

By: GerardM

GerardM — Fri, 03 Jul 2009 14:53:05 +0000

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

By: andrew

andrew — Fri, 26 Jun 2009 17:30:43 +0000

Eugene:

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”.

Yes, every discussion page has a ‘header’, which is what you will edit to add banners and such.

By: Eugene

Eugene — Tue, 23 Jun 2009 02:24:45 +0000

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”.

By: Charlie

Charlie — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:16:11 +0000

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.

By: Ryan Lane

Ryan Lane — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 15:02:00 +0000

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.

By: andrew

andrew — Wed, 17 Jun 2009 14:55:44 +0000

Phoebe:

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.

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.

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.

That’s what the “oldest threads first” and “newest threads first” options are for

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?

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).

I look forward to seeing this in action on a bigger wiki! Maybe we should deploy it on meta

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!