Wikia's Message Wall as an alternative to wiki talk pages: transcript

Key points

• Talk pages encourage thoughtful discussion, are integrated with the wiki and are public and archived, but are hard for newcomers and awkward with watchlists.
• The Message Wall uses a mini-editor, automatic thread following, notifications, separate thread pages and per-thread histories.
• Old talk page conversations are archived automatically when the wall is turned on, and posts can be removed with a stated reason and restored.
• Each post is a subpage in a Message Wall namespace, so the existing wiki history and parser still apply.
• About 7,700 wikis had enabled it, and several, such as Vampire Diaries and Children's Books, showed more unique posters.
• A forum system on the same structure was planned as the next step.

Chapters

1. 0:12Introducing Wikia and the talk page project
2. 1:49What talk pages do well and where they fall short
3. 3:26The Message Wall and how posting works
4. 7:05Histories, activity feeds, archiving and removal
5. 10:53How it is built on MediaWiki
6. 11:56Questions on oversight and Facebook inspiration
7. 15:06Rollout and results on Wikia wikis
8. 20:11Forums, admin notifications and templates Q&A

Full transcript

0:12Boys, good afternoon. Hi, I'm Danny Horan. This is Thomas Adrovnik. We work for Wikia, and I welcome you to our presentation for this slot. Wikia is a website that hosts small wikis. Basically, anybody who has a passion, something that they love and want to write about, can get together with other people and do it on a wiki platform. one. Right now we've got about 200,000 wikis and I actually am curious people in the room who have been on wikia, who have contributed to wikia I want to know where the wikia people are Alright, awesome can I just like a couple of, what wiki have you been on?

0:53Lyric wiki is fantastic 24 wiki 24, oh that's great and was it you? Somebody else? Skyrim wiki Skyrim wiki, okay great And I was like, yeah. Alright, so that's a lot of what we got. So entertainment stuff, music, TV, video games, crazy humor, all kinds of stuff. A couple of seats over here. What we want to talk about is some work that Tomek and I have been doing for about the last year, looking at user talk page and how we can build a different kind of communication system. There's stuff that we love that's super, super important about user talk pages. It encourages really thoughtful, ongoing conversations. Wikis, and specifically on talk pages, it's one of the very few places on the internet where people really talk in paragraphs. And I love that. It's amazing about us.

1:49We're writers and editors and we love to write. Another thing that's really important about it is the communication system is integrated with all the other kinds of systems on the wiki. It's not sort of a separate part that's away from article editing or uploading. So it's integrated with, we've got a wiki activity feed as well as recent changes. It has a history, it's part of somebody's contributions. Another thing that's really important is that it's public and it belongs to everybody. So even if I leave a message on a person's talk page, anybody who sees it can get involved.

2:21And that's actually kind of special. And also that everything is archived. You don't lose anything. You don't delete anything. I think the wireless one works. Am I not loud enough? All right. I will do this. I will be louder. So. Awesome stuff. Some problems with the TalkPage system that I think everybody here is probably familiar with is that the first time you meet anybody, you have to say, hi, welcome. Here's the instructions for how to say hello back. Not super accessible and always makes me sad. We have to explain, like, how do you put in headings, how do you use colons for indent, how do you sign your name. Signing your name, it turns out, I don't know if folks here realize this, turns out that was pretty much nailed by everybody else on the internet quite a long time ago for us not so much and then also there's you know confusion about exactly where do I reply and watch lists are super important and

3:26awesome but kind of a pain when you're trying to leave a message on you know on somebody's talk page you watch their page and then you get an email every time they update their user page or somebody else talks about something else. And also for me, as somebody on Wikia, I'm a big contributor to the wiki that I started, Muppet Wiki, and it's really easy to lose track of all the conversations that I'm having on all these different pages. So what we've been working on for a while is an update for that and a way to keep all of the stuff that's really super crucial about user talk pages and also deal with some of these things, make it a little more accessible and a little easier to use this is what we came up with it's called a message wall And we gave it that name, MessageWall, because essentially, when people hear that phrase, they make some assumptions about how it's going to work and what they can do with it. And those assumptions are basically correct. That was a big goal for us. And that's actually a slide I will now show you in real life. Here I am on my wiki, just to kind of scroll down a little bit.

4:32but this is basically what it looks like. Folks are place to write, and then there's threads as you go down, basically like a regular user talk page, except there's a place to reply. And I can keep going. And then also, if there's a really, really long conversation, and we had a little bit of a problem with 119 recently, you can use this to then see everything all the way down the darn page.

5:03So that's how that works, and I will kind of go through some of that now. So this is how you use it. This is my friend BanjoDog. He's a sock puppet, and he's a dog, and he can play the banjo, so that is very special for him. The way that it works is you can put in a title, and then you write the message. It loads with our, what we call the mini-editor. It's like a mini-visual editor so that you can do stuff like creating links or external links, all that kind of stuff. You can do here. You hit post.

5:41And then it posts it right there on the page. Automatically, BanjoDog just posted this message, so automatically he's following it. He's posting it on my wall, so I'm automatically following it too. You can sort of toggle that on and off if you don't want to hear about it anymore. And what else we got? So BanjoDog left me a message, and then here I am with a little one from my notifications. And now I get a notification that he left me a message, which is awesome. And I click on that, and that actually doesn't take me directly to my wall.

6:11It just takes me to the thread, which is another thing with user talk pages that's kind of hard sometimes. So you know that somebody's made an edit. It's hard to say exactly where. Often you have to look at a diff to find out. For this, for the message wall, we just put that thread on a separate page. And there I am replying to it. So we've got the mini editor stuff, but we can also just use regular wiki text for links and for italics for all that basically anything like you put a picture and you can put a gallery and whatever you can do with the text you can do here that posts you can also there's a little drop down for each thread and also for each reply and so you can for example edit my post which I'm about to do And so now this indicates that it was edited a minute ago.

7:05And then there's a history for it. So again, we really wanted to make sure that this stuff all worked in line with wiki people's expectations about how much you can see and how much sort of control you have over what's going on. So we've got a history for each thread. We've got a history for the whole wall. And in the thread history, you can see diffs and find out what got edited. it also appears in recent changes like this and so it's just listed under the name of the thread so this is banjo dog writing to me this is me writing back and then editing this is our wiki activity feed same kind of thing uh on the wiki activity feed we actually don't feel like we have to show absolutely everything in chronological order so for any of these message wall conversations we can kind of squish it together either the two most recent in that conversation if you're interested in this then you can click through to the thread page that's how that works and then also then also this

8:14is a my contribution so it's again showing me leaving that message and then a diff for the thing that I edited At the bottom of the page, it also automatically archives. So this is all the way down at the bottom. It'll paginate. And then also, you know, on Muppet Wiki, we had about six years worth of conversations before we turned on the message wall, all on user talk pages. And we know, obviously, that that is huge, a huge part of our history on the Wiki. So we don't want to throw anything away. We don't want to delete everything.

8:47So when we turn the message wall on, it just automatically archives everything. And then I click on that link. So that stuff is still there, all the history is still there. We just don't need to use exactly that system anymore. What else we got? And also, another thing that's important on wikis is that people are able to sort of, the community can kind of monitor what's going on on the site. So if there's something bad that gets posted, we have a little remove function so that you can go in either for the whole thread or for that message and you hit remove and then it asks why you want to remove it everybody has to fill this in if I'm gonna take something off of a wall we prefer that people don't on the whole because obviously all that stuff is sort of part of the history if it's something real bad though and you have to then you just are explaining why to the rest of the wiki If you want, you can click a box that says Notify an Admin, and an admin on the wiki will just get a one-time notification that says,

9:47Hey, there was a problem over here. You might want to check in on that person. You hit Remove, and it goes away. That appears there just that first time for me, so I know it's done. Anytime anybody else goes to that page, they won't see it. But that stuff is also still part of, this is now a wall history, which shows posts that are created, deleted, removed, whatever. And so for this one, it's showing that that thread got created. And there's the summary that I wrote about why I removed it.

10:21And then it's still there. It's still part of the wiki. If you click through on a link from either contributions or from that wall history, you end up on this page where it's telling you that this is removed and it's telling you why. This took us forever to figure out just the mechanics of, okay, we want to make it easier for people to take off bad stuff. But if taking something off is the bad thing that they're doing, we want to make it easy for people to put it back. It was fun. That was a fun several months.

10:53This is actually all built on top of MediaWiki. Yeah. You want to say anything about how it's built? Yeah, sure. Every post basically is a sub-page to message wall of this user. Message wall is a namespace. So we're just creating an article. So we maintain whole history and everything is working exactly as the article page. and I think that's Yeah, because every of these things is a separate article, we need to combine the history and show it as a different page than the history of talk page, which is just one single pile of text and it's just skin on top of this list of articles so i know i ran through all of that super fast because it's a lot of stuff and

11:56i wanted to show everybody was there anything i kind of skipped through that didn't make sense or anybody has a question just about kind of how it works yeah I have two questions. Do you still have the ability to oversight things on others? Yeah, absolutely. It's just that remove thing. If I can click in there and go to remove, it'll take it out of people's view. And then, especially if I'm not an admin, anybody can do that. Can, like, take something out the same way that anybody would be able to edit a talk page and take out something that's nasty. And then admins also have the power at that point to just delete it and really take it out of everybody's view.

12:33And also, did you get inspired? It seems, like, really similar to the Facebook wall. Yeah, you noticed that. And there's two latest... that is not a coincidence yeah like the old PHP BB stuff yeah yeah we took inspiration from a bunch of places but Facebook was definitely one of them we actually did like maybe more than a year ago we did like a really quick alpha hack to try to figure out how to do this kind of thing and at the time we called it an inbox and we tried to make it look like Gmail and a lot of the structure of it was the same and you could reply and it was sort of structured as threads. We showed that alpha demo to people just who worked in our office who are you know are real people who know wikis and know how they work. Everybody got it, everybody liked it up until the point that they said so can I see what other people are working on or talking about and we said

13:34Sure. You go to their inbox and then you read their messages. And everybody freaked out. It was a long afternoon. I was doing these tests with one person after another after another. Each time I would say, what words can we use that will make you not freak out like that? Kept trying, just structuring it to look like Gmail just felt wrong. And so the whole team was looking at that stuff and saying, there has got to be something on the internet where you can direct, have a conversation directed at a person.

14:07other people can see it and talk and that just feels okay and so we went down the list of the most popular websites in the world we got to number two that's it they nailed it so that's why you know yeah we definitely took a lot of inspiration from them they also like stuff like having a thread page on a separate thing that you get to from the notifications we've been working on a lot of things for the last six years Facebook has been working on this so it turned out that they were good inspiration but there's also a lot of other stuff and we obviously put in a lot of things like the remove and talk histories and stuff like that that is really just sort of that's our wiki stuff it needs to work that way yes So this question could get you in trouble with this crowd. But you said, oh, this took us so long. And given the demise of liquid threads and maybe the visual editor is going to happen this year or not in Wikipedia, I'm actually wondering how is it you're able to innovate in this way in Wikipedia?

15:06Yeah. I'm going to throw that question out to the crowd, for everybody to crowdsource. What do you guys think? We can go a little bit faster, obviously, than Wikipedia. Yeah, a lot of this stuff, and I've been talking to, we work a lot with the guys from Wikimedia Foundation, we're all familiar with each other's projects, and between us and Wikimedia, and then also a lot of other people who are running Wiki platforms, we're trying to answer a lot of the same questions and so we can go a little bit faster sometimes because we can just make stuff and so actually I'll show you the kind of thing that we've been doing so this is we did our first beta test on about 10 wikis in October and then in February put it live and what we call wikia labs and let people turn it on so the admins for each wiki decide we want to use this on our wiki and it's been just a really nice gradual pickup right now it's about 7700 wikis including about 160 of our top 500 and this is the kind of thing that happens

16:12once people turn it on so this is one of our wikis the vampire diaries based on TV show you can see that in the summertime so this is the blue is talk page messages that were posted on that wiki and then the red is message wall posts. During the summer, obviously, it's kind of dead. New season starts up. Then in January, they put the message wall on, and automatically, there start to be more posts. And so that's interesting. The thing that I'm really excited about is this.

16:45Each of these is unique people posting on a message wall for Vampire Diaries Wiki in that month. And obviously, it got a lot more people involved. And I think a lot of the accessibility issues went away. So that's Vampire Diaries. I'll show you a couple others. Resident Evil wiki. Same kind of thing. So talk page edits versus message wall posts. Same kind of thing for the contributors. This is basically the pattern that we're seeing. And just a little while ago, we're now sort of working on taking this kind of structure and creating a forum around it. Beth, BethL23, is the founder of the Children's Books wiki.

17:28and so she posted to me and told me you know we're talking about forms she's saying we don't use forums right now at all I've seen a big increase in the amount of messages users have been posting since the introduction of the message wall clearly that UI really takes away the fear factor of leaving a message which was awesome to hear especially because I think that children's books wiki Different than Resident Evil, different than Vampire Diaries. It's not that kind of gamer, if you'll pardon the expression, nerd kind of wiki. It's more, and I say that as a Muppet nerd myself, it's actually more moms who have young kids and want to write about the books that they're enjoying with their children and aren't necessarily familiar with the edit window and all that stuff, wiki text.

18:16so this is what happens on children's books it's obviously a much smaller number to start with but we've seen that same kind of pickup and then this has also been really nice so really small numbers but November and December two unique people in that month posting on user talk pages goes up to nine when they put on the message wall and two to nine for that wiki is really really huge and important so this is just a quick table of the kind of increases that we've seen basically actually go back what that table is showing is we've got what is this five months that they've been using message wall compared to the previous five months before they started and this is basically what we're seeing Dragonvale wiki is an iPad game and we've definitely seen like with that kind of casual gamer this is working really well But we've also got sort of all our more typical entertainment stuff and gaming stuff.

19:16Once people put this on, we're just seeing more people having more conversations. What else do I have? And so it's really, really hard for us to say, and that turned into people making article edits. Because there's actually, on each of these individual wikis, there's a lot of reasons why there might be, basically it's like there's new content about this. For a TV show like Vampire Diaries, it goes up and down based on the season for video games it goes up and down based on releases and DLC but I thought what the heck I'll try anyway so what this is based on these are the wikis in red here that as of this week have turned on message wall so it's not sort of it's not counting them as they turned it on this is just how those contributions have gone for that set of 160 wikis and And then this is the other 340 in the top 500.

20:11And so I ran that number, and I thought, well, that actually looks kind of cool. I'm not going to take credit for it. I'm just going to put it on the slide and show it to people to see what happens. So that's also something that we've been really excited about. And now I will take more questions. Yes. What about the pages? What a good question. Or pro-shaped pages. Like Wikipedia, there's pro-shaped quotes, pro-shaped ads. Yeah, there's a lot of places where people talk. Yeah, on the wikis.

20:44And so that includes, I mean, there's also category talk. There's all kinds of places. Where we are right now is we've now done this with user talk and we're very happy to see the results that we've got. the next thing that we're doing that we're working on right now and we're gonna release the first beta demo of it onto a couple wikis next week is a forum system that's based on that same kind of accessible structure and also that feeds into that same notification system and so that's sort of part two for us at that point once people are used to that and like it if it turns out that we can connect those conversations to articles we're gonna see how that goes I'm sort of optimistic about the whole thing but there's still kind of a lot of development that we need to do yeah this is open source yes whole Wikia code is accessible we have SVN repository and we are happy to share things

21:47How does it select the admin order, is it just to arrive at the end? That's sysdops. People with sysdops privileges. How does it choose which one? For our wikis, for Wikipedia it's a little different because Wikipedia has, I don't know how many admins? Thousands? Yeah, that would work different. For our wikis, it's usually, like on an active wiki there might be five or ten.

22:19And so what that does, you click notifying admin, it puts a little notification in for every admin until one of them sees it and clicks on it. And then as soon as one person has seen it, one admin has sort of clicked through to take a look at it, we take that notification away. There could be also one page for each occasion. Yeah, and yeah, we could be doing that with sort of to make it more like a system of like patrolling like people do. A funny thing that's happened with this is we worked real hard on that remove and restore thing.

22:50And I don't think people are using it that much. It's good. Like, I'm glad that we have it. It's really important. those moments that you need it you really need it. I think it's possible, I have a theory that I'm kind of just not seeing it very much, that possibly it's easier to be a jerk or be a vandal on a regular user talk page because you hit edit, you just type everything in capital letters and you hit save. On this Here. The way that it works, let's say I'm posting something, my avatar is next to it, and it's going to post with my name, and if I'm not logged in, it's going to post with my IP address.

23:29I think there's something about that design and that functionality that makes vandal spamming a little bit less exciting of a thing to do. So, you know, people, it's there, but we're not actually seeing folks use it that much right now. Yeah, I'm sorry, I didn't hear it. Do you have anything extra spamming? I'm not familiar with that too.

24:01Yeah, it's set up actually for us. We have a welcome bot, and it's set up to allow that to happen. I don't know if we've had any problems with spamming this at this point. I'm going to take maybe like one more question, but then there's other people who are going to speak. Do you have any community that has a message wall use templates as messages, and did you see an increase or decreases? You mean templates like giving a warning or something like that? Or giving a welcome or whatever. We've got an automatic welcome thing that happens and each wiki can basically create their own welcome template, so it's still using the one that people have already set up.

24:46Yeah, there's some, there's a little space that people can customize. And also, I'm not sure if I understand correct the question, but your concern is that instead of using a template, now people need to write the thing. You can still, you can still use actually a template inside the message wall messages, because we're running the message through the same parser which article runs, so. I just did that really low. All right. There are people who have messages. I want to talk to everybody, and luckily I have the next four days of my life to do that.

25:22But these guys got bumped from the last presentation. They've got to get up here. Feeling bad about that. If you guys want tough pigs on the Muppet Wiki, you can talk to them. Yeah, and also... On the message wall. Yeah, you can come to my message wall. That was me up there with the Miss Piggy icon. and then also my you were just taking a look for probably longer than you needed to at our email addresses so I'll be here let's talk to you

Source and licence

Recording: File:Talk Page is a Broken Message Wall, Building a More Efficient Communication System - WikiCulture and Community - Wikimania 2012 Washington DC.webm by Wikimedia DC (2012-07-13), via Wikimedia Commons. Licence: CC BY-SA 3.0. The transcript, summary and chapters on this page are shared under the same licence (CC BY-SA 3.0).

The transcript is machine speech-to-text by the TidyTools Audio & video transcriber; the summary, key points and chapters were written by Claude from that transcript. Both may contain errors: check the recording before quoting it.