Hi there,

Hi .I tried to begin a relationship with one of the developers, but it mainly ended in me waiting for months and then finally repetitively using AIM (instant chat) to drill information out of him. 1 of my bugs was dealt with, 2 were ignored, and then Brion became extremely confrontational with me after a spat over some image copyright issues. Anyway See: http://www.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk%3ABrion_VIBBER_(archive) (search for "hfastedge" multiple times on the page)

Brion can be a bit moody, but his contributions to the software, the content, and the project as a whole (maintenance etc.) have been enormous. He's the closest thing we have to a Wikipedia admin, so please bear with him if he behaves like an admin sometimes ;-)

That said, I really hope you will contribute to our codebase, as we are in desperate need of more developers. In my experience, it is a good idea to discuss significant changes like the ones you propose below on wikipedia-l or elsewhere before entering the coding stage. Otherwise people may be pissed off when the change is instated without discussion.

1: make chatting better

Yeah, we definitely need to revamp the talk page process. There are many ways to do that, and some have already been proposed.

OR (the fact that ~~~ and ~~~~ points to user: instead of user_talk: is stupid, as ONLY changes to user_talk shows you a global notification)

Well, the purpose of the user link is not strictly to enable a direct reply, but to allow me to check who the person in question is. The ~~~ and ~~~~ are also used for voting and in other places where a link to the talk page would not be what is desired. And a sudden change of the link would create an ugly mess as people try to navigate old and new signatures.

Furthermore, I personally think that splitting replies across many different pages should be discouraged. That makes it almost impossible to follow a conversation. Yeah, I know, you get the nice message notification, but if that drives people to splitting up a conversation, then something is wrong with our talk page process. I would much prefer a solution that addresses this.

In the meantime, I suggest replying directly on the talk page where you receive a message, and using your "My contributions" link to check whether people have responded to messages you have written (if so, yours will no longer be the top edit).

The most conservative solution would be for changes on the user: page to activate the "you have new messages" feature as well.

That would encourage people to use the user pages as talk pages. This is a bad thing for several reasons, among them being the fact that the behavior of pages in the talk namespace is already subtly different from those in other namespaces, and may become moreso in the future. Conversations should therefore be confined to the talk space, so that all of them benefit from features we add to this namespace.

Let me repeat, I agree that we need to fix the talk page process, but I think we should address the core of the problem, namely how people have conversations on Wikipedia. The two features I am most interested in:

- threaded discussions (without giving up openly editable pages) -- have a tag that is appended to a message that allows others to click a "reply" link and post a reply without having to edit the entire page - have a better way to watch your discussions, e.g. "My conversations" as a separate section in "My contributions", which would highlight changes to talk pages you have recently edited

2: A feature to change collections of links. Namely suppose you move an article, and want the areas of text that link to this article to instantly reflect the new name.

I am very, very wary of all features that do something to a lot of pages simultaneously, mainly because I am always worried about their potential for evil. Imagine an edit war across several pages, with a vandal renaming all instances of an author's name to "Cunt", and sysops having to revert it. Not only that, think about handling edit conflicts when you have just made a change to 20 pages.

Also note that redirects should work nicely in many cases. In other cases, I think it *should* be somewhat of an effort to make a substantial name change so that people will not do it lightly and unnecessarily. Frequent title changes can be very annoying.

Maybe as a sysop feature, but we try to avoid having too many of those.

And im not really sure right now if its a good idae to go a step further and have an instantaneously-change-all-textual-links-to-new-name-without-this-human-veri fication-process-that-I -just-laid-out.

Let me assure you, it is not :-)

3: slight improvements to the history sections. Namely: besides a "page history" link, each article should also have, on the top level, a link to the diff between the cur and last revision.

Why? I'm trying to think of the process where this is useful. I can come from several places to an article:

1) From RC. When I do that, I often check a change directly from RC by clicking the "cur" link.

2) From watchlist or contributions page. Watchlist has diff link, contri list doesn't, but should.

3) From internal search or search engine. In this case, I'm either interested in the article's entire history or the content only.

I do not see the rationale here.

Next: is that every user contributions page should have links to the cur, the last diff, AND the diff of the last edit that user made.

Not sure what you mean with "the diff of the last edit that user made". To this specific page or in general? I think we only need one link, namely the one that shows the user's edit to this page, and that should simply be called "diff". I hate the "cur","last" distinction and, I have learned, so do others. It's confusing as hell. But the contri list definitely needs a diff link.

Hope that helps. If you want to contribute to a redesign of the talk page process, please join wikitech-l and let us hear your thoughts.

Regards,

Erik