Wikipedia talk:Wikipedia Signpost/2009-10-05/New talk pages

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• LiquidThreads is a critical feature that I feared had been long abandoned. New users, and drive-by readers who just want to offer a factual correction, are often frustrated by the talk page interface, forgetting to "sign" or placing their new thread in the wrong place, and some are too intimidated by the peculiar syntax to even try. With this feature plain text posts are easy to write with no special syntax, and all the familiar benefits of forums will be available to us. I strongly recommend helping out with the testing and pushing for deployment. Dcoetzee 03:16, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
• It sounds like a good idea. My only concern would be vandalism - would non-admins be able to revert vandalism on talk pages as they can now, or will this be an admin-only function? Apart from this, I like this - it would certainly be good for newbies who (as mentioned) can be put off by the current system. This would be more like the forums etc that most of them would have used elsewhere. -- PhantomSteve (Contact Me, My Contribs) 07:37, 6 October 2009 (UTC)

• Yes, there are vandalism fighting features built in. :) You can play with LiquidThreads at the sandbox on the strategywiki, or at the liquidthreads lab. - Philippe 15:49, 20 October 2009 (UTC)

• Not only newbies are put off by the current "system". Paradoctor (talk) 08:16, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
• The huge difference, to me, will be the ability to watchlist individual threads, not whole pages. Tony (talk) 11:47, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
• Why call it LiquidThreads if it is in fact just a simple forum? --88.70.241.133 (talk) 15:47, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Probably because it causes threads to act more liquidly - that is, they can be handled in a much more free-form manner than the current system easily allows for. In all actuality, it seems to me that LiquidThreads is in some ways actually more flexible than most forum software, and not just because (as I understand) we should still be able to take full advantage of existing wiki markup while using it. 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000} 17:23, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Because it sounds cooler ;) — Jake Wartenberg 03:22, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
    • Well, yes, there is that, too... =) 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000} 18:03, 9 October 2009 (UTC)
• I like the idea but I hope it's simple to operate, because as Paradoctor has said above newbies could be put off if the syntax is too complex. --FF3000 · talk 20:25, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
  • Errrm, I was not complaining about wikicode, I was referring to the fact that organizing discussions is currently an almost entirely manual process, i. e. a drag. Newbies who don't know wikicode are of course doubly burned in this respect. Paradoctor (talk) 21:09, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
• With the system in use at the present time (does it have a name?), my post, to an earlier section on a discussion page, or even in response to a much older comment in the latest section, might not be noticed as much as a comment at the bottom of the latest section. Sometimes, I simply do not have a comment ready as soon as the page shows the comments to which I am later ready to respond. Sometimes, for that reason, I decide to withhold my comments because of a lack of potential prominence for the comments. Does this new system offer any improvements in regard to late responses to much earlier comments? -- Wavelength (talk) 22:15, 6 October 2009 (UTC)
  • I think it works in that regards much the same way actual forums do - threads with new replies automatically get moved to the top of the list (stack?). Or are you trying to ask something else? 「ダイノガイ千？！」^{? · Talk⇒Dinoguy1000} 17:45, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
    • I did not know that about actual forums, but if everyone becomes accustomed to looking at the top of a discussion page for the latest replies, then maybe there is adequate prominence for a reply posted much later than a comment to which one is replying. You seem to have correctly understood my question. -- Wavelength (talk) 19:35, 7 October 2009 (UTC)
• I feel that this will be a very big and positive step forward in Wikipedia (as well as the other Wikimedia wikis) especially regarding the more user-friendly nature of the interface. As Wikipedia was gotten more and more popular, it was attracted more and more new people to the site – many who don't even know the basics behind computers let alone wiki syntax – which we as a community (that I mean both editors as well as developers) need to cater to. MuZemike 03:48, 11 October 2009 (UTC)