With the Foundation’s support, I’ve spent the last few months churning away at LiquidThreads, a new discussion system that is proposed for use on Wikimedia projects.

Essentially, it’s an attempt to marry the radical openness of the wiki paradigm with the usability and practicality of a forum-like system. As the name implies, LiquidThreads is designed to allow any user to easily refactor discussions while maintaining edit history, to edit other users’ comments, and to collaborate on a summary of an ongoing discussion. LiquidThreads also brings many standard communication features lacking from wiki discussion pages, such as watching and protecting individual discussion threads, RSS feeds of comments in a discussion or on a discussion page. In the world of online communication, its approach is entirely unique.

LiquidThreads has been in alpha testing on Wikimedia Labs for several months, and, more recently, it’s been used in a production context on the strategy wiki, where it has been quite well-received. It’s been easy to run these smaller trials, as the extension allows the activation and deactivation of LiquidThreads discussions on individual pages with a simple parser function.

While there are still some issues remaining before wider trials, I believe I can resolve most of them quite quickly (within a few weeks when my vacation finishes at the end of next month), and I’d like to get the ball rolling in proposing small-scale trials on some of the larger wikis, so that a full discussion can be had, and so that adjustments can be made on the basis of ongoing feedback. I’d especially like to see LiquidThreads used on some of the higher-traffic discussion pages on English Wikipedia (such as the technical village pump), and progressive rollout on some of our mid to large sized wikis.

So, I’d like to encourage you to have a play with LiquidThreads, either on the strategy wiki or on the test site (which generally runs a newer version). Tell me what you like about it, and (far more importantly) what improvements you think it needs before we can expand our trials to wider parts of the Wikimedia Universe, and perhaps move towards a full rollout of this very exciting technology.

I should give the following caveats about LiquidThreads as it stands. These are all issues that I intend to address before any trial expansion occurs.

• Presently the system is somewhat vulnerable to abuse. I intend to make changes to the way signatures work, and improve tracking and listing of thread actions by specific users.

• While LiquidThreads allows for thread summaries and discussion headers, the system does not currently have support for collaboratively-edited posts which are unsigned or signed by a group of people. These are a key piece of any decision-making framework, and I intend to make adjustments to make this possible.
• There is no support for embedding LiquidThreads discussion pages on other pages.
• There are plenty of minor interface issues which I intend to clean up.

Feedback is best directed to the dedicated feedback page, or, alternatively, to bugzilla (although before filing a bug, you should check the list of existing LiquidThreads bugs).

Thanks,

Andrew Garrett

Here’s an overview of the new interface

Overview of the new LiquidThreads interface

The new interface relies on paging, rather than archiving. Instead of artificially removing a discussion from a talk page when it’s done, the discussion page is paged. Only ten discussions will be shown at a time, and anything beyond that can be accessed simply by hitting ‘Next’. Old discussions will naturally fall ‘off the bottom’ of the discussion page, as they do in forums, comment threads, and most other discussion systems in the world.

I’ve also redesigned the thread display. Instead of having a footer with the pertinent information, and using indentation to show threading, I’ve put the information at the top of an enclosing box, which includes all of the replies. It makes it much easier to see who’s replied to what, and when. It’s also much more consistent with other systems of threaded discussion.

Finally, I’ve streamlined the interface for ‘actions’ you can take with a post, like editing it, watching it for replies, checking its history, or deleting it if you’re an administrator. By putting these into a drop-down, the actions are within easy reach, but stay out of your way if you just want to read the posts.

Over the next few weeks, I’m going to be working on making the comment workflow AJAXy, making all comments searchable, and other miscellanea.

What do you think of the new interface? How can it be improved? Let me know in the comments.

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!