I think we decided to use the topic name here for consistency (see T75409: Flow: magic words for page name in a post render as Topic:UUID but preview as Flow_board_name, including https://gerrit.wikimedia.org/r/#/c/188253/2 .

When we do T75409: Flow: magic words for page name in a post render as Topic:UUID but preview as Flow_board_name, this will be a friendly page name.

However, we would still need to figure out a different way to get the user name. A user script could do it easily. Not sure if most welcomers use scripts. I know Twinkle has welcome support.

Afaik, most welcomers paste a template, or use a script to paste a template. The templates almost all (?) use BASEPAGENAME.
I checked ~15 interwikis linked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Welcome and variants linked at https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Welcoming_committee/Welcome_templates
and all used BASEPAGENAME or PAGENAME.

Some, also use it in slightly different ways, in addition to just getting the pagename, E.g. Itwp uses Benvenut{{safesubst:GENDER:{{safesubst:PAGENAME}}|o|a|o/a}}

Hi, this is not restricted to "Welcome" templates. There are several other user message templates that adress the user by his/her name. Some random examples from Commons (I'm sure there'l be similar ones on other projects):

• {{End of copyvios}}
• {{DeletionRequest}}
• {{AdminWelcome}}
• {{Please link images}} (using PAGENAME instead of BASEPAGENAME for some reason …)

Most of these templates are placed manually by users (usually subst:ed), so while scripts may help for automated welcomers I don't think they would work as a general solution. Looks like we may need a new magic word like FLOWBOARDNAME?

In T109373#1548218, @El_Grafo wrote:

Most of these templates are placed manually by users (usually subst:ed), so while scripts may help for automated welcomers I don't think they would work as a general solution. Looks like we may need a new magic word like FLOWBOARDNAME?

Yeah, it's worth discussing. Or, to make it more general so it worked on wikitext, OWNERPAGENAME or something. We could also discuss changing the BASEPAGENAME behavior, but there are related things that have to be taken into account.

A new magic word makes life complicated for cross-wiki messaging, unless the magic word has a sane default in MediaWiki core, since Flow is not enabled on all wikis. Also, you would probably need several magic words, e.g. to address the page that hosts the flow board, the subject-space page belonging to it, the root pagename (for e.g. usernames)...

IMO changing the behavior of BASEPAGENAME &co. makes more sense as there isn't really any use case to use them for topic/summary pages which do not come in talk/subject pairs and have no subpages.

I think also that {{ARTICLEPAGENAME}} should return user's page name, and not just a topic name, as now. Meaning, call this function not for the topic, but for the talk page it belongs to.

New report of that problem, on zh.wp.

New request to fix this.