YK: Chapter 6: Communication

6 Communication

MediaWiki provide a variety of ways for users to communicate with one another. These include talk pages for potentially large-scale discussions, personal communication via user talk pages (and potentially via more social networking-like interfaces in the future), threaded discussions at the bottoms of pages via some extensions, real-time chat, and finally users emailing each other via the wiki. We’ll cover all of these in this chapter.

Talk pages

As we saw in the last chapter, every regular namespace for content in MediaWiki has an associated talk namespace, meant to hold pages used to discuss the contents of pages in that regular namespace. In the interface, one of the elements that usually shows up automatically for each page is a link to that page’s corresponding talk page; in most skins this is the second tab within the top row of tabs. A page and its corresponding talk page will have the same name, but in different namespaces; for instance, the talk page for “University of Chicago” would be “Talk:University of Chicago”, while the talk page for “Category:Universities” would be “Category talk:Universities”.

Talk pages in MediaWiki, in general, are intended only for discussion of the corresponding page and how to improve it, and not for discussion of the page’s underlying topic ­ that holds true for both Wikipedia and internal organizational wikis. There are two major exceptions to that, though. Talk pages for users, i.e. pages in the “User talk:” namespace (in English), are usually used for communication with that user, and only rarely to discuss the contents of the user page itself. And on wiki pages meant for documenting some technical topic, like a piece of software, the talk page can often turn into an informal venue for questions and answers about the page’s topic.

Let’s take a look at a typical usage of a talk page. On a page on an internal wiki, you see the information that the South American division of your company was founded in 1983. This is a surprise to you, since you had always thought that the division was founded in the 1990s. Your first instinct is to simply edit the page and change the information, but then you reconsider, thinking that you’ve just been misinformed. (The real lesson of this example may be the importance of trying to reference every piece of information; see here for more on that.)

You decide, then, to bring it to the talk page. You click on the page’s “Discussion” tab, and then among the tabs will appear one called either “Add topic” or just “+”, depending on which skin you’re using. You should click that tab. Then you’ll see a standard edit interface, but with the addition of a “Subject/headline” field at the top. In that field, you could write something like “Founded in 1983?”, and in the body, the following:

I had always thought the South American division was started in the 1990s - I think I heard that during the employee orientation. Was it really in 1983? If so, is there a source for that? Blik (talk) 00:04, 14 June 2016 (PDT)

Then you hit “Save”, and the new section is created. The “Blik (talk) 00:04, 14 June 2016 (PDT)” at the end is important ­ the set of four tildes gets changed, when you save the page, into a “signature”, containing your username, a link to your talk page, and the date and time the message was posted. You could also put “Blik (talk)” instead ­ three tildes instead of four. This will display everything but the date and time. In practice, there’s no good reason to do this; four tildes is always better.

If you’re not logged in, your IP address will be displayed instead of a username ­ which is not very helpful, so you might as well manually type in your name and the data, instead of using the tildes, in that case.

Now it’s time to wait ­ a response could come in the next hour, or in the next month, or of course not at all. You can keep checking the talk page, or monitor it via one of the many ways of monitoring MediaWiki pages ­ recent changes, watchlist, RSS/Atom, email, etc.

If no response appears within a certain period of time (entirely up to you), you can feel free to make the change you were thinking of making ­ you can even make the change at the same time as you post the talk page question, so that you don’t have to deal with it again until a response comes.

Now, what happens if a discussion does ensue on the talk page? There’s a standard syntax that’s used. As we saw in the MediaWiki syntax chapter, colons are used for indenting paragraphs, and in the case of talk pages each message is usually intended one further than the previous message. After five or six colons, though, the discussion usually goes back to no colons, for the sake of both sanity and readability, and then the pattern begins again. And if a person’s statement is more than one paragraph, each paragraph should begin with the same number of colons.

As before, every statement should end with the user’s signature, set by typing "Blik (talk) 00:04, 14 June 2016 (PDT)".

Archiving

If a talk page starts to get very long, the solution is to archive old comments. Unfortunately, there’s no way to do that automatically ­ it has to be done by hand. You do that by copying some or all of the current talk page into a separate page that’s a subpage of the main page, i.e. a page with the name "Talk:name of page/something else". Then the relevant content is removed from the current talk page, and a link is placed in the talk page to that archive page.

Templates help a lot when archiving talk pages. Usually two templates are used: one to be placed at the top of the talk page, that holds links to all the archive pages for that talk page, and another to be put at the top of archive pages, explaining that this is an archive page and linking back to the talk page.

There’s no need to create these two templates from scratch: you can copy them from any wiki that does talk page archiving. On the English-language Wikipedia, for instance, they can be found at the pages “Template:Archives” and “Template:Talk archive”, respectively. You could consider going with the two templates at mediawiki.org as well, which have a simpler layout and use a nice file-cabinet image (which itself also would have to be copied over ­ File:Replacement_filing_cabinet.svg ­ or you can use the InstantCommons feature to use the image directly; see here). You can find these two templates at "Template:Archive box" and "Template:Archive" on the mediawiki.org wiki.

On Wikipedia, archiving is usually done when the talk page reaches over 35 KB or so, and the archive pages are usually given sequential numbers: the first archive page is called “Talk:page name/1”, the second one is called “Talk:page name/2”, etc. This works fine, although we recommend an alternate approach for naming: using the date within the name, so that the subpage is called “/2013” or “/May 2013 to January 2014” or “/May 2013”, etc., depending on the span of time contained within the archive. This makes it easier for users to find a particular old discussion, if they can remember approximately when it happened. There’s no reason, however, to set the frequency of archiving based on this: just because you have archive pages named “2012” and “2013” doesn’t mean that you need a page named “2014”, if there’s not enough content for that one year.

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LiquidThreads

This basic setup works fairly well for most discussions, on Wikipedia and many other wikis. However, there are problems with this approach. For one, it’s not all that user-friendly: users have to learn a new mini-syntax just to be able to make comments. Second, it lets users modify one another’s comments, which is sometimes useful (in the case of vandals), but most of the time should not be done. Third, it doesn’t allow for true threaded discussions: if you see a comment halfway through a discussion and you specifically want to respond to that one, it’s difficult to do that in a way that makes what you’re doing clear to readers of the page, and doesn’t interrupt the flow of the previous discussion.

The LiquidThreads extension, in its own way, gets around all these problems. It provides for structured, threaded discussions on each talk page. Figure 6.1 shows how an empty talk page looks if the LiquidThreads extension (also known as "LQT") has been installed.

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Figure 6.1 LiquidThreads interface

Using LiquidThreads, any user can start a new thread with any title, or respond to any specific comment that’s already been made. And users can edit their own comments, but not anyone else’s.

With LiquidThreads, users get notified about new messages on talk pages they’re watching (see here for an explanation of watching pages) via a link at the top of every page, which reads “My new messages”, then the number of new messages that have appeared on all of those talk pages.

It’s a setup that some people really like, while others prefer the simplicity of standard wiki-style commenting.

One huge caveat if you’re considering using LiquidThreads: though the extension still sees a significant amount of use, the Wikimedia Foundation, which is responsible for its design and development, officially abandoned it in 2013 (in favor of the still-in-progress Flow extension ­ see next section). LiquidThreads is still maintained by a few developers, and it currently works fine for all recent versions of MediaWiki, but there’s no guarantee that it will keep working in the future.

Echo & Flow

Over the longer term, there are two Wikimedia projects that are meant to, among other things, provide a forum-style interface for talk pages, and make communication easier among users. Those are the “Echo” and “Flow” projects:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Echo_(Notifications)

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow

Echo is a framework for user notifications in general, which allows a greater range of notifications than MediaWiki otherwise supports, like one user “thanking” another for their edit to some page. Flow, which makes use of the Echo framework, is meant to create a system in which communication happens both within talk pages (using a threaded approach) and outside of pages, allowing individual users to simply “message” one another”. Both projects are still in progress, though Echo is already in use on Wikipedia, notifying users when their talk pages are changed, their edits are reverted, etc.

Handling reader comments

It should be noted again that, with both regular talk-page style and LiquidThreads, the talk page is meant, for the most part, to be a place to discuss the contents of the relevant wiki page and not that page’s actual subject matter. But what if you want a place for readers (not necessarily even the wiki’s own users) to comment on the page’s subject matter, or more generally, to place any sort of free-form comments? One solution is to simply use the talk page for that, and avoid wiki-style editing-based discussions altogether. This approach can make sense when the wiki is what’s known as a "bliki", or a wiki where pages are generally blog-style, dated posts. Blikis are usually edited by one person, but even if they’re not, generally no collaboration happens on the content, so there’s no need to use talk pages to aid in collaboration. That frees up the talk pages for use in storing reader comments.

There’s an extension that’s helpful for that purpose: ArticleComments. It provides a nice blog-style comment-entry form that appears at the bottom of pages, and also displays the resulting comments at the bottom; but, unbeknownst to most readers, the actual storage of the comments is done on the talk page.

For cases when actual collaboration happens, though, and you want both collaboration-related discussions and blog-style comments, we recommend reserving talk pages only for the former. In this case, one solution that works well is to use a third-party commenting tool, and place it at the bottom of pages that require it. At the moment, what seems to be everybody’s favorite such tool is Disqus (http://disqus.com). The easiest way to add Disqus commenting to MediaWiki is to use the "Widgets" extension, and add in a Disqus widget ­ see here.

Chat

There are several extensions that display a window, within MediaWiki web pages, that provides a chat room for all the users currently logged in to talk with one another in real time. These extensions are only very rarely used, perhaps because there’s generally nothing substantive to be said between two people who both happen to be reading, or even editing, a wiki at the same time. These extensions include the one called Chat, which uses the PhpFreeChat utility:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:Chat

The Chat extension provides a new tab, called “Chat”, which shows up on every page. In this tab is a chat room interface. The extension can be configured to either have a single chat room across the whole wiki, or to have a separate one for each page.

The other main chat extension is ShoutBox, which uses the Shoutbox chat service. It allows for embedding chat rooms directly within wiki pages:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:ShoutBox

Emailing users

The page Special:EmailUser lets any user with a confirmed email address email any other user on the wiki with a confirmed email address. The user can set anything for the email’s subject and body. The email that is sent will have the sender’s username and email address appear as the “From” in the email, so you shouldn’t use this page if you want to hide your email address from the recipient.

MediaWiki does not offer a way for administrators to email all of the wiki’s users at once. There is an extension that does this, “STGS MassMailer”, but it is currently insecure.

There are several extensions that allow the wiki to have a contact form, where users can enter comments that will then be emailed to one or more administrators. You can see the full set here:

https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Category:Contact_form_extensions