Wikinews:Water cooler/technical/archives/2024/February

Reusing references: Can we look over your shoulder?

Apologies for writing in English.

The Technical Wishes team at Wikimedia Deutschland is planning to make reusing references easier. For our research, we are looking for wiki contributors willing to show us how they are interacting with references.

• The format will be a 1-hour video call, where you would share your screen. More information here.
• Interviews can be conducted in English, German or Dutch.
• Compensation is available.
• Sessions will be held in January and February.
• Sign up here if you are interested.
• Please note that we probably won’t be able to have sessions with everyone who is interested. Our UX researcher will try to create a good balance of wiki contributors, e.g. in terms of wiki experience, tech experience, editing preferences, gender, disability and more. If you’re a fit, she will reach out to you to schedule an appointment.

We’re looking forward to seeing you, Thereza Mengs (WMDE)

LiquidThreads deprecation

Hello everyone

As you might already know, the Wikimedia Foundation works on changes to how IP editing is handled: IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation. Temporary accounts for unregistered editors will be a new type of user account. This requires changing how all the features we use to contribute to the wikis' work. This impacts LiquidThreads (LQT), used at your wiki.

LiquidThreads is a talk pages feature that is not developed since 2014. Only 5 wikis use this extension. As a consequence, we take the opportunity of the work on temporary accounts to remove LQT from the wikis.

Discussion tools are the replacement for LQT. They are the default discussion system at all wikis. They allow anyone to start, reply or subscribe to a conversation. They provide a visual experience on wikitext-based conversations, and they offer more features than LiquidThreads.

The goal with this conversation is to respond to your questions regarding the archival of LiquidThreads.

The idea is to proceed in two stages:

1. discussion pages using LQT are archived as subpages. The pages left blank are replaced by a classic discussion page. In this way, the most active pages will already be ready when we proceed to step 2:
2. LQT are removed from the wiki. Existing pages (including archived ones) will be converted to a format yet to be defined.

We have a few questions for your community:

1. Are the reasons given for removing LiquidThreads clear?
2. Are the two steps outlined above for archiving and uninstalling LiquidThreads clear?
3. If so, what is a reasonable timeframe for archiving pages for deinstallation? At present, deinstallation is not planned on our side (even if the second quarter of 2024 is mentioned).
4. In your opinion, what format should pages currently using LQT be converted to when we proceed with the deinstallation of structured discussions?

If you need clarification, please ask! I've subscribed to this section, and I'll try to answer as soon as possible.

Best, Trizek (WMF) (talk) 16:39, 31 January 2024 (UTC)

1. Yes
2. Yes
3. I don't know: are there many actual talk pages using this feature here? Poking thru Category:Wikinews:Commentary pages on news events, I don't actually see any pages that are formatted in LiquidThreads style. Okay, now I do: Comments:'Criminal in a police uniform' given eleven years jail for role in English drugs gang.
4. Why can't they just be standard wikitext? If there are more than [x] kilobytes of Liquid Threads, then move them to "[foo]/Archive 1".

—Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 01:13, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Thank you Justin.

Regarding point 3, there is no talk page using it now. We can directly proceed on the conversion (which first has to be made).

For point 4, some users can sometimes be creative. We had a suggestion to have contents converted a non-editable page HTML page for example. But the question is mostly on where these contents should be posted; your "[foo]/Archive 1" example is actually the most common one suggested. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 09:33, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

I may be mistaken, but I believe all of the pages in our Opinion (Commentary) tab rely on LQT in part, if not entirely. SVTCobra 11:18, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

@SVTCobra: see the link in my comment above. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:19, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

I'll amend that to "all pages after LiquidThreads was adopted". SVTCobra 11:23, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Needless to say, many commentary pages have no content at all and can just be deleted or could be amended to remove {{Commentary/LQT}}{{#useliquidthreads:1}} and then automatically converted to wikitext and deleted. E.g. Comments:England: West Midlands region floods amid heavy rain, high winds. A bot or an AWB run can do this pretty efficiently. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:31, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

And furthermore, just a cursory glance at the commentaries shows crankery and off-topic noise like Comments:'Expelled' fair use upheld is semi-common. :/ —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 11:34, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

Our review tools automatically create a Commentary page in LiquidThreads style whenever we publish a new article. We may need User:Bawolff to look at this. SVTCobra 11:39, 1 February 2024 (UTC)