This task involves the work with defining an approach for how the software will "know" whether volunteers are using a given page for discussions and subsequently, "decide" whether to alter the page-level elements that appear within them. [i]
Background
The set of mw:Usability Improvements the Editing Team is introducing as part of the Talk Pages Project [ii] will be the first set of changes that impact page-level elements. [i]
These changes to page-level elements are being designed to make it easier for people who are new to recognize talk pages as places to communicate with other volunteers and for people who are experienced to more easily decide what discussions to focus on when arriving on a talk page.
For these "changes to page-level elements" to deliver on the objectives stated above, it's important that they only impact pages volunteers use for discussions.
Trouble is, there is no common set of "rules" which constrain the pages on which discussions can and cannot take place. See ===Cases to consider
This means the software does not yet have a reliable way to decide whether volunteers are using a given page for discussions or not. So, this task is about defining what this "reliable way" will be.
Stories
- As a Junior Contributor, I want to know whether the page I am looking at is used for communicating with other volunteers or not, so that I do not end up contributing to/editing/participating on said page in a way that will disrupt other volunteers and take me further way from the goal I came to this page seeking help about.
- As a Senior Contributor, I want to be able to trust that the page I use to carry out my wiki-work appears to other people in ways that, at a minimum, do not cause them to misinterpret how me, and other volunteers, use said page, so that I do not have to spend effort moderating a page that I have previously not needed to moderate in this way.
Requirements
In progress...
Meta
- The risk of false negatives should be higher than the risk of false positives
Feature availability
- The heuristic developed in this ticket will determine whether the following features are ENABLED or DISABLED on a given talk page:
Approach
| Step/Phase | Description | Ticket |
|---|---|---|
| Step 1a) | Make Usability Improvements avail. on all Wikipedia User: and Article: talk pages | T304751 |
| Step 1b) | Make Usability Improvements avail. on all known sister project discussion namespace(s) | T304752 |
| Step 2) | Empower volunteers to make Usability Improvements avail. on specific pages/within specific namespace(s) | T304753 |
| Step 3) | Make Usability Improvements avail. on all pages where discussions are hosted | T304750 |
A more detailed description of the steps listed in the table above can be found in T303493#7807758.
Open questions
-
1. What cases does any approach we move forward with need to handle?
Done
- The answers to all === Open questions are documented
- A decision is documented about which of the yet-to-be defined ===Approaches the Editing Team will implement to meet the ===Requirements
i. Topic Containers (T269950), Clear Affordances (T255560, T267444), and Page Frame (T269963)
ii. "Page-level elements" in this context means things like: the table of contents, the page title, the page subtitle, the site-wide sticky header on desktop, etc.