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Tech News should not use wikitext in topic titles in topics intended for Flow pages
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Description

Flow does not support wikitext in topic titles, which is causing an undesired rendering when MassMessage delivers such Tech News posts to Flow boards. See for example https://he.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=נושא:Skkwou11fholmwsq .

There are a couple possible solutions:

  • Have a separate list of Flow boards that get a different topic title.
  • Don't use wikitext in topic titles at all.

The topic title could say, for example "Tech News for 2015-28" (with that being translated as well on Meta), and the body could link to [[m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2015/28|Tech News: 2015-28]].

Event Timeline

Mattflaschen-WMF raised the priority of this task from to Needs Triage.
Mattflaschen-WMF updated the task description. (Show Details)

Tech News is unlikely to be the only newsletter or announcement that uses links in topic title. I'm not sure either of the proposed solutions would address that wider issue.

Other solutions include:

  • Have Flow support wikitext in topic titles for backwards compatibility with an arguably common user behavior;
  • Have MassMessage strip wikitext from topic titles when posting to a Flow page;
  • Prevent MassMessage senders from including wikitext in topic titles at all.

Tech News is unlikely to be the only newsletter or announcement that uses links in topic title. I'm not sure either of the proposed solutions would address that wider issue.

Other solutions include:

  • Have Flow support wikitext in topic titles for backwards compatibility with an arguably common user behavior;

We have no current plans to do this; see T59153: Allow links in Flow topic titles. Note that:

  • Including markup in topic titles is not common on the wider web.
  • There are other implications on both the frontend (for example, right now you can click the topic title to uncollapse a resolved topic; you would need to click elsewhere in that topic bar if it were a link) and backend
  • We may be changing Topic URLs to include the title in the future, which would require stripping this markup when building the URL version (probably not too big a deal)

That leaves Tech News adjusting the messages they're sending, or one of your MassMessage suggestions. @Legoktm can probably speak to MassMessage.

Other solutions include:

  • Have Flow support wikitext in topic titles for backwards compatibility with an arguably common user behavior;

+1

  • Have MassMessage strip wikitext from topic titles when posting to a Flow page;

Eh.

  • Prevent MassMessage senders from including wikitext in topic titles at all.

-1

Yeah, I think we should address how to include certain wikitext, especially links.

A few things to consider:

  • We need to make sure there we're not including things that would break the feature -- file and category links? Templates? etc.
  • How will it appear on history and contributions pages, where the title is already rendered as a link?
  • Are we using the wikitext editor for titles? If it's VE, it might add <nowiki> around the links.
DannyH triaged this task as Medium priority.Jul 8 2015, 11:43 PM
Trizek-WMF subscribed.

Poke @Johan, who will be in charge of TechNews soon.

Is there a simpler way of finding out which pages on the Tech News distribution list are Flow pages than manually going through them?

Is it not preferable to remove wikitext from titles? On French Wikipedia it is a discouraged practice (but I don't know elsewhere).

Yeah, I think we should address how to include certain wikitext, especially links.

Follow-up: This is now moving forwards as T59153: Allow links in Flow topic titles

  • We need to make sure there we're not including things that would break the feature -- file and category links? Templates? etc.

This is addressed by only supporting the same markup supported in edit summaries (which does not include any of those).

  • How will it appear on history and contributions pages, where the title is already rendered as a link?

Wikitext, at least initially.

  • Are we using the wikitext editor for titles? If it's VE, it might add <nowiki> around the links.

Probably will not support an editor initially.

I'm wondering if T111453 is somehow related. Maybe not.

Flow has allowed links in topic titles for a while now.