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Store Talk page discussions in Structured Discussions (but do not use UI)
Open, Needs TriagePublic

Description

Problem
It is difficult (if not practically impossible) to determine if two users have participated in the same discussion. We can easily determine if two users have talked on the same talk page, but determining if they are in the same discussion is extremely difficult (especially if they did not leave an accurate signature). It is also difficult to determine if one user modified another users comment.

Solution
StructuredDiscussions provides a way to store discussions in a structured manner so they can be queried easily. We should use this on wikis that do not use Structured Discussions as a storage/retrieval mechanism. The UI (and workflow) would not change for users, we would only parse the revision and store it within Structured Discussions. This would allow us to quickly determine if a user has participated in the same discussion, or if they modified another users' comments (etc.)

Event Timeline

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TBolliger subscribed.

This would be invaluably useful for a handful of Anti-Harassment projects but this is a pretty large chunk of work and (fairly) raises the question of "why not just improve Structured Discussions to the point where it is universally used?"

This is out of scope for the Anti-Harassment team and likely the Collab team over the coming year, but something to think about.

why not just improve Structured Discussions to the point where it is universally used?

Truth. For our uses though, I would limit the scope to just using it as a storage engine.

Ironically, by doing that, we'd technically also be adding the ability for people to seamlessly switch between the two UIs (structured and unstructured), and even allowing some users to have one and other users have the other. The StructuredDiscussions team would just need to make the switch.

Related, for the purposes of InteractionTimeline and other tools: T69397

The likelihood of this ever happening is slim-to-none. Marking as declined until it becomes an unavoidable blocker for a team.

dbarratt raised the priority of this task from Low to Needs Triage.May 20 2019, 8:04 PM
dbarratt added a subscriber: DannyH.

@DannyH I created this task a while ago when thinking about the work for Anti-Harassment, I hope this helps. :)