Talk:Community Wishlist/W191

Agree!

100% agree! Great wish. However, it kind of only elaborates on a problem without specifying what (a) solution(s) could be.

I think there is an issue with long-form linear only discussions when it comes to argumentative debates such as the case in many CfDs, AfDs, policy change discussions, talk page debates about edits, and so on. Things are not structured by the points made and which points they address. Often, people put long walls of text that repell further editors to join the debate or be able to quickly get the points of the debate.

I suggest you take a look at Kialo (linked an example debate there). I would suggest that it's integrated so people can turn talk discussions into argument trees or create the argument map from the debate and then embed these there or even start a debate with an argument map where everyone can make new claims underneath the point they're addressing....but it's not open source (Argüman is but it's inferior to it). I think things would be more overseeable and have better clearer results if one used a more structured approach for debates but I don't know how in practice. Prototyperspective (talk) 23:38, 2 August 2024 (UTC)

Also regarding It is difficult to distinguish open items and issues in dispute from resolved or agreed upon items and Once a discussion gets archived, it becomes even more difficult to find. Realistically what ends up happening is the whole discussion is brought up yet again at some point in the future, and all the work that was done previously goes to waste. this is addressed at Community Wishlist/Wishes/Do not fully archive unsolved issues on Talk pages. Prototyperspective (talk) 17:10, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

No, just difficult

The talk page interface is not especially user friendly when a discussion is large:

• It should be easy to navigate directly to the newest item
• It should be easy to navigate through the discussion in chronological order
• It should be possible to collapse sections of the discussion to retain focus on the parts of interest
• The display needs to show more clearly which comment a reply is replying to – especially if there are intervening sub-discussions

— GhostInTheMachine talk to me 17:18, 29 July 2025 (UTC)

I think these are all things that are best dealt with in part or largely via improvements to the Reply tool – see mw:Talk:Talk pages project/Replying#Issues and the mainpage of that. What you describe could be in part further issues for the Reply tool or become better possible if people use only the Reply tool for talk page discussion (which requires some issues to be fixed first). However, even if all what you said was implemented many of the problems described here still remain such as the discussion being large unstructured and unoverseeable with many things being repeated. Improved chronological order wouldn't help that really and it would be difficult anyway since there are many subthreads in threads and it's not entirely clear what you mean since those most commonly already largely are chronologically sorted). Prototyperspective (talk) 17:15, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

Is there any planned development on the Reply tool? The Talk pages project is officially ended and the replying page had one update in 2023 and nothing since. Are there any Phab refs or anywhere else tracking any plans? — GhostInTheMachine ^{talk to me} 18:13, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

I'd like to know too. At the wish about various Reply tool issues ARamadan explained implementing these changes is technically complex and would benefit from the approval of a related technical RFC. Furthermore, here you can see the latest resolved issues relating to the reply tool so it's actively developed (you can change the status to open to see open issues there). Prototyperspective (talk) 23:30, 30 July 2025 (UTC)

What specific change is being requested here?

This feels more like a rant than an actual wish. * Pppery * _{it has begun} 16:30, 10 October 2025 (UTC)

Oppose

This just explains a big genuine problem but does not specify any solutions to it and it could specify multiple approaches or solutions instead of just one but without such it's unclear and not very useful. I may make a new wish about enabling structured argument maps like this which could address this and there also is W368: Fix the issues breaking the Reply tool which partially addresses this. --Prototyperspective (talk) 13:46, 22 October 2025 (UTC)