[Foundation-l] LiquidThreads in Beta testing at labs.wikimedia.org

[Andrew Garrett]

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-testing-on-wikimedia-labs/

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

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

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