| ppelberg | |
| Feb 17 2022, 5:15 PM |
| F36862920: Screen Shot 2023-02-20 at 10.41.41 AM.png | |
| Feb 20 2023, 6:43 PM |
| F35600753: Screen Shot 2022-10-19 at 12.06.01 PM.png | |
| Feb 20 2023, 6:43 PM |
| F35600745: Screen Shot 2022-10-19 at 12.06.12 PM.png | |
| Feb 20 2023, 6:43 PM |
| F35600749: Screen Shot 2022-10-19 at 12.05.31 PM.png | |
| Feb 20 2023, 6:43 PM |
This is a parent task to capture the work involved with offering people stable/persistent/permanent links to talk pages comments everywhere they're referenced within Mediawiki's interface.
| Phase | Wikis | Deployment Ticket(s) | Status |
|---|---|---|---|
Wikipedia editors very frequently link to prior discussions or individual comments on talk pages, often as a way to build on past precedent. However, the current design of talk pages makes this very difficult.
The easiest current way to link to a past section is to go to the top, click on the section in the table of contents, and copy the relevant portion of the URL, and then paste it in brackets to create the wikitext link. This is cumbersome and introduces underscores which harm the visual appearance.
Individual comments are even worse — the main way to link directly to those is to hunt through the page history to find the diff, which can be extremely tedious for old comments (or, more rarely, to copy the URL from a notification to a reply in a section you're subscribed to).
As the Talk Pages Project works on revamping the design of talk pages, I hope you'll consider adding something like a chain link icon next to the [edit source] or [subscribe] links in section headers, and next to the [reply] button for individual comments. Clicking on this would copy a wikitext link to the section/comment that could then be pasted into a comment elsewhere referring to it (perhaps even with the fancy blue highlight flash when you click on it).
Thanks for merging the task, @Esanders! I thought I'd seen something about this before, so glad to know it's being actively considered. I'll unsubscribe from here to avoid a notification blizzard, but feel free to reach out here/on-wiki if you'd like feedback about the feature as you develop it.
@Sdkb you might value trying out the gadget @Esanders wrote. It's a work-in-progress implementation for linking to specific talk page comments in one click.
Installation instructions can be found here: https://w.wiki/5TFE
Note: if you end up trying out the gadget and see ways in which it could be improved, I'd value you letting us know as much :) .
Thanks, @ppelberg! Trying it out, I like it. The main areas for improvement are things around the edges.
Visually, it'd be nicer if it were separated by a pipe from the reply button, e.g. [ reply | link ] rather than [ reply ] [ link ]. I'd prefer the chain icon to text, but that's likely at least somewhat reflective of the fact I'm a power user.
The link it copies is the URL rather than the wikilink, which makes it more useful for some circumstances than others.
The most significant issue is that it doesn't appear that the links will persist once discussions are archived. I'd love to see Discussion Tools take on and improve @SD0001's find archive section gadget.
Meta: going forward, we'll use T321233 as the source of truth for the cases/contexts we'll make permanent links available within.
Below are the details about the overall permalink user experience the Editing Team discussed/converged on offline during the team's 27 September meeting.
Assuming we do not uncover information that causes us to reconsider the deployment plan as currently described, the next steps are to: