Community Wishlist Survey 2022/Larger suggestions/Special care for discussion archives
This proposal is a larger suggestion that is out of scope for the Community Tech team. Participants are welcome to vote on it, but please note that regardless of popularity, there is no guarantee this proposal will be implemented. Supporting the idea helps communicate its urgency to the broader movement. |
Special care for discussion archives
- Problem: We have a lot of archive pages. They are actually a kind of separate entity, but we store them next to other discussions and even in namespaces where we have guidelines and policies (which also interferes with the search). Therefore, pages are decorated in different ways and warning templates are added to separate them from other pages.
- Some wikis try to color the entire archive page with a grayer background. (For example, in a template with a warning text that this is an archived page, a tag is added that covers all the following page content. The parser automatically adds a closing tag to this tag, which is why editors usually do not bother to put a closing tag manually at the end of pages and because of this tens of thousands of pages fall into categories with Lint errors. Template styles do not allow you to influence the entire page. It is inconvenient to demand and monitor the closing tag in all the many archives and no one is going to. Therefore, the situation is rather hopeless. Also, due to the large tags wrapping the content, the error detection tools in the Special:LintErrors stop showing the exact location of the error.)
- Some wikis hide edit buttons in headers (using Behavior switches). But sometimes it is more convenient to fix or copy something by opening a small section for editing, rather than an entire page.
- Proposed solution: The ability to switch pages to a special content model or otherwise assign them a group to which a separate warning can be displayed when editing, a separate visual design for pages, and, possibly, setting the level of protection. Each wiki, in its own way or following the example of other wikis, could customize the design and behavior of such pages. Maybe local special styles would be applied to these pages, or an appeal to the Phabricator would be required. When editing such pages, we could customize the warnings displayed. For some wikis, it will be useful to be able to restrict the editing of only these pages for ip-editors (after all, no one monitors vandalism in the archives).
- Who would benefit:
- Wiki-sites - a centralized approach to archive design will reduce the number of Lint errors and design methods used through templates on each archive page.
- Participants will get a way to separate archives from other pages and apply common protections and design to them.
- More comments:
- Phabricator tickets:
- Proposer: Сунприат (talk) 00:13, 14 January 2022 (UTC)
Discussion
- Hello and thanks for taking the time to write this proposal. We reviewed this proposal as a team and have determined that this is out of scope for our team but an idea that's valid nonetheless. I am therefore moving it to the Larger Suggestions Category. Thanks again! Regards, LDelench (WMF) (talk) 15:21, 28 January 2022 (UTC)
Voting
- Support After the changes talk pages received lately, archive pages should be next. Klein Muçi (talk) 01:53, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
- Support Lectrician1 (talk) 02:08, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
- Support The situation isn't desperate, but archive pages are their own distinct entity, and they should have a distinct tag to go along with that. {{u|Sdkb}} talk 04:31, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
- Support Aca (talk) 16:23, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
- Support —— Eric Liu(Talk) 18:40, 29 January 2022 (UTC)
- Support Hemantha (talk) 06:02, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
- Support OwenBlacker (Talk) 12:09, 30 January 2022 (UTC)
- Support Libcub (talk) 01:49, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- Support — AfroThundr (u · t · c) 14:12, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- Support Bluerasberry (talk) 17:32, 31 January 2022 (UTC)
- Support – Ammarpad (talk) 16:32, 3 February 2022 (UTC)
- Support - Darwin Ahoy! 21:00, 4 February 2022 (UTC)
- Support Maybe a namespace Archive: to solve the idea like Archive:Talk:.../39, ... Thingofme (talk) 15:05, 5 February 2022 (UTC)
- Support --Ciao • Bestoernesto • ✉ 20:25, 6 February 2022 (UTC)
- Support //Lollipoplollipoplollipop::talk 11:38, 7 February 2022 (UTC)
- Support Uanfala (talk) 01:25, 10 February 2022 (UTC)
- Support Jl sg (talk) 09:03, 11 February 2022 (UTC)