Talk:Community Wishlist Survey 2015/Top 10 notes

Add a user watchlist

The proposel #4 is to make the article watchlist global. Therefore should the user watchlist also be global? --° (Gradzeichen) 22:49, 19 December 2015 (UTC)

Migrate dead links - multithreading

I don't know if you've considered it, but you can instantly get "multithread" up and running for free by tossing the single threaded code on additional box(es) tackling different chunks of the list. They don't need to be dedicated machines. Alsee (talk) 12:18, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Global cross-wiki user talk page

The Analysis section lists significant technical challenges for cross-wiki talk pages. I believe it raises significant social complexities as well. Cross-wiki watchlists and/or Cross-wiki notifications pretty well solves the primary issue - knowing when someone leaves you a message on another wiki.

Suggestion: Contact the people who supported this, note that it's a tough one, and see how many consider cross-wiki notifications and/or cross-wiki watchlists to be a satisfactory solution? It may not be worth allocating the resources on this one. Alsee (talk) 18:00, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Global notification & watchlist are needed, but so is the global talk page. Without it you often get a welcome message on your red local talk page, when you enter a wiki for the first time. And others cannot follow your talk page interactions in other wikis. --° (Gradzeichen) 20:10, 26 December 2015 (UTC)

Original proposer here. I am fully aware of the fact that this is indeed a tough one, and I am perfectly fine with slow progress in this task (as long as there is progress). I understand that other technical improvements might migitate the issue that I used for motivation to some extent, but I still think that—with SUL in place—a simplification of the “user profiles” (user pages + user talk pages + preferences + X) across the large wiki farm is a good idea in the long run. With the Wikidata project up and running, there is now much more exchange between different Wikimedia projects, since Wikidata is fed by the projects and vice versa. There is a growing amount of multi-wiki editors, and thus a clear demand for simple user profile management across multiple wikis. So even if this task is not solved by the next community wishlist survey in one or two years, I think it is definitely worth to work on it. —MisterSynergy (talk) 10:07, 27 December 2015 (UTC)

MisterSynergy, do you have any thoughts on how we'd handle the community jurisdictional issues? Sometimes a community blocks someone's access to their own talk page. Sometimes we declare talk page content unacceptable and either delete the content, sanction the user, or possibly delete the talk page entirely. Sometimes we sanction people for harassment or other behavior on other people's talk pages. Can Oversight at any community vanish any content on a talk page? Or do people have to deal with language barriers requesting foreign Oversight? Note that a small wiki can have a dysfunctional community with abusive/dysfunctional admins and other officials. I don't think we want them having effectively global powers over talk pages, and on the other hand I don't think anyone wants English or Meta playing sole overlord and policeman for User_Talk of all foreign communities. Having User_Talk default to an arbitrary "home" wiki reduces some of those problems for most cases, but it invites gaming the system and cross-wiki disputes. I'm having trouble picturing any good way to handle this stuff if unified User_Talk were implemented. Alsee (talk) 12:53, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

No, I do not have a real plan how to do that right now, but I think it is clear that this task involves some kind of community legislation. There were already some related comments during the voting phase that should be considered of course. For the legislation process, Meta would probably be the place to do that: the communities can be involved here easily. It is important to realize that global talk pages have not been prevented by judical problems in the past (as far as I know). Non-global talk pages are technical legacy of the Mediawiki development process of ~15 years. —MisterSynergy (talk) 15:14, 29 December 2015 (UTC)

MisterSynergy, as the proposer is any chance you'd be willing to get the ball rolling on this? An answer to these issues may well include technical requirements on how we want the WMF to implement it. The nightmare scenario would be an inability to resolve these issues, and the community opposing it after it's built. Alsee (talk) 14:20, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

I am actively following progress in this task and I will participate in community actions, if necessary. However, I have not been involved in legislation processes like this one yet (neither on Meta, nor in any other Wiki), so there is definitely a lack of experience in this regards on my side. I am thus not the one “to get the ball rolling” at the moment. But I think it would be the best anyway if the Community Tech Team puts some effort into this idea first and presents a specific and elaborated concept how to go about it (for instance: how would they design a global user talk page, where to locate it, which technical limitations apply, what would be different than with status quo, how much effort needs to be spent for the implementation, things like these etc.). We can thereafter discuss/improve their ideas and consider the legislation changes that are necessary. This would be easier than a discussion just on the basis of the rather abstract idea of the proposal right now. The actual implementation of the code could be done after community comments/discussions. —MisterSynergy (talk) 18:40, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

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One possibility would be to have a special wiki hosting global talk pages, with people heading to a local usertalk page automatically landing on the global one.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk) 13:53, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Read-only transclusion?

I won’t pretend to understand all the technical issues, but if the principal motivation for this feature is the inconvenience and fallibility of monitoring numerous user-talk pages, I wonder if this need could be satisfied by a global page that merely transcluded the contents of all the associated pages—which seems to me much easier than creating a page that’s ‘live’ on multiple wikis. As I picture it, each section header would have an edit-link to the local page it came from, local links in the transcluded content would get prefixed so as to point to the source project, local templates would have to be substituted, and each local user-talk page would have a sidebar link to the global one. With single-click navigation in each direction it would be just about as easy to edit discussions as if they were actually on the global page. You’d have to ask the proposal’s supporters if this would adequately address their problems, but if so I expect there would be fewer obstacles to its implementation, both technical and jurisdictional, than with the ‘fully shared’ model implicit in the discussion above.—Odysseus1479 (talk) 22:18, 1 January 2016 (UTC)

One thing to think about is whether you could treat individual discussions as discrete units. If I have active user talk pages on French WP, Croatian WP and Greek WP, when you transclude them together, I end up with a very long page that's not necessarily easier to process than just looking at the two individual pages.

The thing that makes transclusion so useful on pages like Articles for deletion is that each entry is its own subpage, so you can treat them as individual units. That's the thing that would make my hypothetical French/Croatian/Greek user talk page worth looking at -- I want to see the new items from each page, rather than scrolling through the entire French page to get to the Croatian.

Now, that's a solveable problem -- you make each discussion a linked subpage, like they do on XfD -- but it means losing some of the freedom of an open wiki page to refactor and do things outside of a specific discussion. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 01:12, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

Rather than transcluding whole pages, then, could it be done on a section-by-section basis, with a configuration template on the global page, similar to an archive-bot’s, for setting how many threads, or how recent, to display there? Perhaps with an enhanced ToC that groups & identifies sections by source project?—Odysseus1479 (talk) 08:35, 2 January 2016 (UTC)

You guys are totally describing Flow right now. ;) (And I heard that Flow boards, since they're already stored centrally in a single database for all wikis, could probably be displayed in multiple places on multiple wikis too. Maybe not right now, but it would likely take less effort to implement than creating something from scratch, and Flow is supposedly the future still – even if it's in maintenance mode for now ;).) Matma Rex (talk) 01:25, 3 January 2016 (UTC)

Watchlists

Since you're working on watchlists anyway, maybe take a look at task T2424 Add a direct unwatch link to entries on Special:Watchlist? It shouldn't take much work other than adding X buttons on the main watchlist display. Alsee (talk) 01:39, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

I'm not sure. That wasn't mentioned at all in the Wishlist Survey (as far as I can remember), and we're trying to concentrate on the wishes at the top of the list. If it's an easy task, then it might be possible for a volunteer developer to do it. You could ping Qgil on that ticket -- he's working on matching small-scope tasks with volunteer devs. -- DannyH (WMF) (talk) 21:13, 14 January 2016 (UTC)

The Navigation Popups Gadget does this (under the “actions” menu), in case anyone’s looking for a workaround (or perhaps a source of code for a single-purpose user script).—Odysseus1479 (talk) 04:28, 15 January 2016 (UTC)