Hi all,

With the Foundation’s support, I’ve spent the last few months churning away at LiquidThreads, a new discussion system that is proposed for use on Wikimedia projects.

Essentially, it’s an attempt to marry the radical openness of the wiki paradigm with the usability and practicality of a forum-like system. As the name implies, LiquidThreads is designed to allow any user to easily refactor discussions while maintaining edit history, to edit other users’ comments, and to collaborate on a summary of an ongoing discussion. LiquidThreads also brings many standard communication features lacking from wiki discussion pages, such as watching and protecting individual discussion threads, RSS feeds of comments in a discussion or on a discussion page. In the world of online communication, its approach is entirely unique.

LiquidThreads has been in alpha testing on Wikimedia Labs for several months, and, more recently, it’s been used in a production context on the strategy wiki, where it has been quite well-received. It’s been easy to run these smaller trials, as the extension allows the activation and deactivation of LiquidThreads discussions on individual pages with a simple parser function.

While there are still some issues remaining before wider trials, I believe I can resolve most of them quite quickly (within a few weeks when my vacation finishes at the end of next month), and I’d like to get the ball rolling in proposing small-scale trials on some of the larger wikis, so that a full discussion can be had, and so that adjustments can be made on the basis of ongoing feedback. I’d especially like to see LiquidThreads used on some of the higher-traffic discussion pages on English Wikipedia (such as the technical village pump), and progressive rollout on some of our mid to large sized wikis.

So, I’d like to encourage you to have a play with LiquidThreads, either on the strategy wiki or on the test site (which generally runs a newer version). Tell me what you like about it, and (far more importantly) what improvements you think it needs before we can expand our trials to wider parts of the Wikimedia Universe, and perhaps move towards a full rollout of this very exciting technology.

I should give the following caveats about LiquidThreads as it stands. These are all issues that I intend to address before any trial expansion occurs.

• Presently the system is somewhat vulnerable to abuse. I intend to make changes to the way signatures work, and improve tracking and listing of thread actions by specific users.

• While LiquidThreads allows for thread summaries and discussion headers, the system does not currently have support for collaboratively-edited posts which are unsigned or signed by a group of people. These are a key piece of any decision-making framework, and I intend to make adjustments to make this possible.
• There is no support for embedding LiquidThreads discussion pages on other pages.
• There are plenty of minor interface issues which I intend to clean up.

Feedback is best directed to the dedicated feedback page, or, alternatively, to bugzilla (although before filing a bug, you should check the list of existing LiquidThreads bugs).

Thanks,

Andrew Garrett
Software Development Contractor

I’m very excited to announce that LiquidThreads, the next-generation discussion system that I’ve spent the last few months developing for the Wikimedia Foundation, is now in beta testing on liquidthreads.labs.wikimedia.org.

Sample of the LiquidThreads interface

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Hi all,

Some of you might have already seen my blog posts about LiquidThreads, Wikimedia’s in-development discussion system.

For those who haven’t, this is a quick primer on what LiquidThreads is, and what it’s going to do for Wikimedia’s communities.

Currently, Wikimedia’s discussion system sucks. Here’s why:

• It’s not easily usable by the average user. It isn’t obvious how to leave a comment on a talk page, or how to reply to a comment. The indenting we use now is ad-hoc and unsustainable for long discussions.
• Signatures are done manually and we have to jump on poor unsuspecting newbies who don’t know this (or write bots…)
• Archiving is done unevenly by bots, which are maintained by users and therefore of very uneven quality. Archives are something of a black hole — they aren’t searchable, easily maintainable or easily accessible. You can’t resurrect an archived discussion easily, nor can you view its history.
• It’s stored as plain wikitext, which is opaque to any sort of automated process.
• You can’t move a thread to a different discussion page and preserve its history.
• There’s no encouragement, mechanism or incentive for quoted, point by point inline replies like we’re all used to with e-mail.

Imagine being a new user and trying to figure out how to add your comment to this.

Enter LiquidThreads. LiquidThreads is a system that makes MediaWiki’s discussion system behave like a forum or comments thread, while still maintaining the unique refinements that make wikis work. It was originally designed by a Google Summer of Code student, David McCabe, and I’ve been making incremental improvements to make it work for Wikimedia.

Overview of the new LiquidThreads interface

So, what’s changed?

• Comments are separated from each other in the wikitext, so there are no more edit conflicts in discussions, and the usability is vastly improved.
• Instead of indenting, each comment is in its own box, along with its replies. It makes it much easier to follow each post and its replies, and it’s much nicer on the horizontal whitespace. Hopefully, it will be the death of the ‘arbitrary section break’!
• Each post has its own history page, making it easy to see what’s going on with individual threads without trying to navigate the history of a whole page.
• It’s easy to move threads between pages, preserving the page history.
• Discussions  are never ‘archived’. Instead, older discussions fall to the bottom of the page, and eventually they drop off entirely, to hit a new page. If you missed the chance to have your say, just reply to a discussion and it’ll be bumped right up to the top of the page again!
• Discussions with recent changes are at the top of the page. Discussions that have fallen dormant fall to the bottom. It’s easy to find out what’s happening!
• You can watch individual threads of a discussion, and even get an email when they’re replied to.
• It’s easy to link to a discussion, and the links are permanent unless the discussion is deleted. There’s no need to point to an archive or to an old revision ID.

If you’re interested, I’ve put together a test setup for you to play with it.

Andrew Garrett, Editing & Discussion Features Development Contractor

As always, questions, comments and suggestions are more than welcome, in the comments or elsewhere.

Hi all,

Just a quick note to let everybody know that in a few days I’ll be changing the TorBlock configuration to require explicit block exemption rather than merely being logged in.

While we would rather this weren’t necessary, it seems that the edits coming through tor are mostly unconstructive; and we’ve had all kinds of nasty harassment come through that way — the community feedback we asked for was overwhelmingly that the ideological benefits of allowing truly anonymous editing are outweighed by the pragmatic concerns of
harassment and vandalism.

To facilitate this, I will also be activating explicit IP block exemption on all wikis. Like on English Wikipedia and many other wikis, administrators will be able to add users to an “IP block exempt” group, which exempts its holder from IP blocks, range blocks and autoblocks, but not explicit user blocks. This is a helpful, albeit inaccessible way to defray some of the problems associated with
blocking Tor users carte blanche.

Please let me know if you have any questions, comments, concerns or suggestions about these changes!

–
Andrew Garrett
Contract Developer
Wikimedia Foundation

I am pleased to announce that the Abuse Filter has been activated on English Wikipedia!

The Abuse Filter is an extension to the MediaWiki software that powers Wikipedia allowing automatic “filters” or “rules” to be run against every edit, and to take actions if any of those rules are triggered. It is designed to combat vandalism which is simple and pattern-based, from blanking pages to complicated evasive page-move vandalism.

A warning given by the Abuse Filter

We’ve already seen some pretty cool uses for the Abuse Filter. While there are filters for the obvious personal attacks, many of our filters are there just to identify common newbie mistakes such page-blanking, give the users a friendly warning and ask them if they really want to submit their edits.

The best part is that these friendly “soft” warning messages seem to work in passively changing user behaviour. Just the suggestion that we frown on page-blanking was enough to stop 56 of the 78 matches of that filter when I checked. If you look closely, you’ll even find that many of the users took our advice and redirected the page or did something else more constructive instead.

I’m very pleased at my work being used so well on English Wikipedia, and I’m looking forward to seeing some quality filters in the near future! While at the moment, some of the harsher actions such as blocking are disabled on Wikimedia, we’re hoping that the filters developed will be good enough that we can think about activating them in the future.

If anybody has any questions or concerns about the Abuse Filter, feel free to file a bug, contact me on IRC (werdna on irc.freenode.net), post on my user talk page, or send me an email at agarrett at wikimedia.org.