For those of us who don't follow the tech blog [1], I'm pleased to announce that LiquidThreads is now in beta testing in the Wikimedia Labs [2].

LiquidThreads is a next-generation discussion system for MediaWiki, which turns talk pages into a real forum, while maintaining the essential aspects of a wiki that make them so effective. It was originally developed as a Google Summer of Code project by David McCabe, and I've spent the last 4 months preparing it for deployment on Wikimedia sites, under contract from the Foundation.

Presently, we're waiting for the labs project to become relatively stable, and have all the features we need. Once that's been done, we will commence a staged roll-out of LiquidThreads on various Wikimedia sites. It should be noted that LiquidThreads has a mode in which it can be switched on or off per-page. My intention is to activate it on sites in that mode, and allow users to discuss pages that would benefit from the enhanced discussion management (I'm thinking of high- traffic noticeboards and discussion pages). Once it's been rolled out and people are familiar with it, we can think about the possibility of turning it on for all discussion pages.

LiquidThreads is very much a work in progress, and your feedback is essential for it to get to a point at which we can deploy it on this wiki. Please do send any and all constructive feedback to the feedback page on the test wiki, and I will do my best to accommodate it.

I'm very excited about the opportunity to bring this technology to Wikipedia, and to give our discussion pages a long-needed overhaul.

[1] http://techblog.wikimedia.org/2009/10/mediawikis-new-discussion-system-in-te...

[2] http://liquidthreads.labs.wikimedia.org

[3] http://liquidthreads.labs.wikimedia.org/wiki/Feedback

-- Andrew Garrett agarrett@wikimedia.org http://werdn.us/