Community Wishlist/Wishes/Do not fully archive unsolved issues on Talk pages
Description
People don't read the archives. This means that often important or otherwise still relevant threads will get hidden to Talk page archives where they just collect dust and are not glanced over or found.
The current way all talk page posts are indiscriminately archived on many articles is problematic. People who wonder about something flawed in the article like some missing information or who want to improve the article and find some of its issues to solve etc won't go to the archives and check whether it's been asked about there already (as these pages' pageviews can prove). They would merely glance over the TOC and maybe some of the threads (or scroll the entire Talk page if it's short).
Not all talk page posts are constructive and point out any or any valid issues and many of them should just be moved to the archive at some point. There are challenges with the proposal – a post can be constructive but editors basically didn't agree or found issues in the details so it got no replies or got replies but wasn't marked as solved. There is a large number of Talk page posts for some of the larger articles.
- A draft concept of what a change to this could look like is that instead of just archiving talk page threads, archival bots still keep the header somewhere in the Talk page. For example it could look like a second TOC beneath the actual TOC (each header has a max-length after which the rest is put into a tooltip or collapsed). Excluded are threads that have been marked as solved. A problem there is that often, if not usually, people don't mark a thread as solved but that could be changed (don't know what to do about the past threads however). See Template:Section resolved and the EasyResolve gadget and I think a button to 'mark as solved' should be added to Talk page threads like it already is with mw:Extension:DiscussionTools which is used on MediaWiki talk pages.
- However, I think this would mean that for some pages there would be a very long list of 'unsolved' talk page threads and they would also include lots of threads that are not really issues that should be addressed. Thus, I think something like the following would be needed: requiring that threads are somehow marked as an issue to be solved. Maybe this marking should be done by other Talk page reader or by the Talk page post creator...one could make it so that only experienced contributors can mark talk page posts like that. If threads have this mark, they would be shown on the Talk page.
- Next to each item on the Talk page for an archived thread there could be a button to unarchive the post to bring it back to the talk page. That button should also be next to every archived talk page post. Making it this difficult to unarchive talk page posts and making people think it's something that's not possible or not allowed means it will nearly never get done instead of somebody creating a new thread and linking to the archived post (often that may however be preferable). There could also be a button to uncollapse a one-sentence-summary of the post which may be needed because many talk page post titles are quite unclear. Importantly, there also is a button to unmark items as open valid issues so they are only in the archive. This is needed especially when adding this feature means lots of threads show up on the Talk page that are either not valid or actual issues or not open anymore (because they have become solved or aren't applicable anymore). Initially and/or on Talk pages with lots of threads in the archive this could also go into some collapsed template. Interested users can then simply without having to go to and load a new page see the prior unsolved threads headers with the click of a button on something at the top of the page.
- Alternatives to the above solution draft may also be possible such as not archiving unsolved Talk page posts in general except for XYZ.
Currently, at most there is a very small hard to find link (probably not even visible on mobile) to some Archive index (example: Talk:Solar System/Archive index) that has the headers. However, it includes also threads that aren't issues or that have been solved, are on a separate page instead of visible directly on the page, is hard to find instead of included as a large/well-visible component of the Talk page, only includes the talk page headers, and does not have the aforementioned buttons. Also there is no need to display the header twice (once in the left column and once for the link). To be clear, this proposal is not about not fully archiving Talk page posts – it is about not fully archiving unsolved issues on Talk pages.
Related wish: Automatically showcase talk page open issues on their respective main pages
Assigned focus area
Unassigned.
Type of wish
System change
Related projects
All projects
Affected users
Wikipedia contributors
Other details
- Created: 22:58, 20 October 2024 (UTC)
- Last updated: 04:09, 22 October 2024 (UTC)
- Author: Prototyperspective (talk)