Wikipedia:LiquidThreads

Sample screenshot of a discussion page using LiquidThreads

This page is about LiquidThreads on English Wikipedia.

LiquidThreads is an unmaintained MediaWiki extension that implemented a new discussion page system. The original code was developed under sponsorship from the Google Summer of Code 2006, the Commonwealth of Learning, and Wikia, later continued by Andrew Garrett. It is used on some Wikimedia wikis.

After exploration and discussion, it was abandoned as a solution going forward for several reasons: poor performance, due to the way individual comments or posts are stored, parsed, rendered, cached, and assembled; no support for globally unique identifiers; and lack of flexibility with regards to workflows and collaboration techniques beyond simple discussion.

About LiquidThreads

LiquidThreads replaced discussion pages with actual forums, which would have given the following benefits:

• A clear, simplified post/reply workflow so new users could jump right into the discussion.
• Simple management of threads, including automation of archival, refactoring, and other tasks undertaken by bots and humans.
• A powerful, flexible notification system, which would have allowed users to keep abreast of developments in areas in which they were interested, ranging from entire discussion pages to discussion fragments.
• Support for following discussion pages with RSS feeds.
• Flexible post ordering, which would have allowed users to users to keep track of which threads on a talk page are dead, and which threads are active.
• A then-modern, AJAX-based interface, that would have allowed users to quickly post and reply to other posts, without clumsy page loading.
• Automatic signatures.

Rationale

The developers of LiquidThreads thought that wiki discussion pages had some advantages over web and Usenet forums. They allowd use of the entire wiki syntax - from images to wiki links to transclusion and made it possible to refactor entire discussion pages.

However, they believed web forums offered a number of advantages over the MediaWiki talk page model:

• Threads could be displayed in different views: flat, nested, sorted by date, subject, etc.
• The user only needed to click a "Reply" button or link in order to respond to a comment. Manual indentation was not required. Quotations from the source comment could be inserted automatically.
• Comments were automatically signed and dated. Avatars were possible.
• Users could watch individual threads or be notified about responses in threads.
• Comments and threads could be displayed individually, without the surrounding page.
• Old comments were archived automatically and invisibly, with permanent links easily available.
• Search for author, subject, date, etc. was possible
• Individual threads could have categories.
• It was relatively easy to manage related discussions in a subject-specific forum, whereas MediaWiki talk pages always followed the "one discussion page per content page" model.

LiquidThreads aimed to unite the advantages of both forum types, and to add some unique discussion features to boot.

Summaries

Each thread could have a summary. The aim of this feature was to summarize a discussion up to some point, a summarization was not supposed to be the end point of the discussion. Ideally, the summary would be continuously maintained while the discussion proceeds.

FAQ

1. Old talk pages would not have been migrated into the new system.

   That sucks, but it's not an easy problem to solve.

2. Would 'you have new messages' still have worked?

   Yes.

3. Would it have been possible to make nested threads which then jump back to a response to the original message look better, with no "break off" in the frames?
   For example; the following:

   Original message

   Reply

   Sub-reply

   Reply that would be messed up in the upper left of the reply's frame.

Sites that used LiquidThreads

• Wikimini.org (used by children 8–13, all talk pages – Example)
• strategy.wikimedia.org (in places)
• English Wikinews (in places)
• English Wiktionary (in places)
• MediaWiki.org (in places)
• translatewiki.net (all talk pages)
• RationalWiki (in places)

See also

• LiquidThreads extension page at MediaWiki.org
• Bugzilla ticket for LiquidThreads deployment
• Improving Wikimedia’s Discussion System at the Wikimedia Tech blog (July 02, 2009)
• Wikipedia:Discussion Tools: the official replacement for LiquidThreads