Talk pages project/Replying
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Talk pages
Help contributors respond to comments on talk pages more easily.
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This page talks about the Editing Team's work to improve contributors' workflows for replying to comments on talk pages, across Wikipedia's 16 talk namespaces. This new workflow for replying to specific comments is intended to make participating productively on talk pages easier and more intuitive for Junior and Senior Contributors.
This initiative sits within our team's larger effort to help contributors work together more effectively. To accomplish this, we will build upon existing community conventions to evolve talk pages. It is our intention to evolve talk pages in a way that gives experienced contributors more leverage to coordinate their work and connect with other editors, while making communicating on-wiki more accessible and intuitive for newer contributors.
To participate in and follow this project's development, we recommend adding this page to your watchlist. We will use this page to do things like:
- Share potential designs and ask for feedback about them
- Test prototypes
- Post updates about this feature's development
- Ask and invite questions about any part of this project (e.g., measurement, deployments, etc.)
What it is
The reply tool is an extra button that appears at the end of a post on a talk page. When you click on it, it opens a reply form that makes replying to that post easier to do correctly. It indents correctly, helps ping correctly, and automatically signs correctly for you, among other things.
See Help:DiscussionTools and Talk pages project/Feature summary (screenshots!).
Technical information
The replying feature is implemented via the DiscussionTools extension.
Troubleshooting information is available at Help:DiscussionTools/Why can't I reply to this comment?
Status updates
This section contains updates about the project's development.
The scale of the Reply Tool's usage has grown beyond what the current architecture of dtcheck.toolforge.org/dtstats can sustain.
Absent of there being a clear need for the Editing Team to invest in updating dtcheck to cope with the volume of edits people are using the Reply Tool to make, we will sunset the feature on September 1, 2023.
Please comment on T341821 if you see reasons why disabling dtcheck would be disruptive for you.
As of 19 May, a new experience is live for the new comment indicator that appears in the Reply Tool when someone publishes a comment while you are drafting a reply.
The Editing Team would like to acknowledge Beta Kots for the work she did in leading the design of this improvement.
Scaling
On Monday, 7 March 2022, the Reply Tool became available to everyone (logged in and out) on desktop at English Wikipedia (en.wiki). Details about this deployment can be found in Phabricator.
Scaling
As of today, the Reply Tool is available to everyone (logged in and out) on desktop at all Wikimedia wikis except for en.wiki (T296645), fi.wiki (T297533), and ru.wiki (T297410). You can see the full list of what Talk pages project features are available at what wikis by visiting Talk pages project/Deployment Status.
Notifications about New Comments
The team is working on introducing functionality that will alert you, in real-time, when someone posts a new comment in the discussion you are using the Reply Tool within. Instructions for how to try the prototype and share feedback about it can be found here.
Scaling
Today, 7 December, the Reply Tool became available by default on desktop to everyone — logged in and out – at MediaWiki.org. You can try the tool on Talk:Talk pages project/Usability.
Scaling
Today, 17 November, the Reply Tool became available by default on desktop to everyone — logged in and out – at Commons.
Scaling
On Monday, 25 October, the Reply Tool became available by default on desktop to everyone—logged in and out–at the French Wikipedia.
Conversations are ongoing with volunteers about also offering the Reply Tool as an on-by-default feature at the English, Finnish, and German-language Wikipedias.
New functionality
Starting next week, you will gain the ability to preserve text formatting when pasting content into the Reply Tool's Source mode.
Scaling
Today, 30 September, the Reply Tool became available as an on-by-default feature at all Wikimedia Wikis except the projects listed here:
- English Wikipedia
- Finnish Wikipedia
- French Wikipedia
- Russian Wikipedia
- German Wikipedia
- Wikimedia Commons
- Meta-Wiki
- MediaWiki
In the coming weeks, we will start conversations with volunteers at the wikis listed above about the prospect of offering the Reply Tool as an on-by default feature there as well.
In the meantime, you can see how often people are using the Reply Tool to publish talk page comments by visiting https://dtcheck.toolforge.org/dtstats.html.
Scaling
Today, 31 August, the Reply Tool became available as an on-by-default feature at 21 new Wikipedias:
Spanish (eswiki), Italian (itwiki), Japanese (jawiki), Persian (fawiki), Polish (plwiki), Hebrew (hewiki), Dutch (nlwiki), Hindi (hiwiki), Korean (kowiki), Vietnamese (viwiki), Thai (thwiki), Portuguese (ptwiki), Bengali (bnwiki), Egyptian (arzwiki), Swahili (swwiki), Chinese (zhwiki), Ukrainian (ukwiki), Indonesia (idwiki), Amharic (amwiki), Oromo (omwiki), Afrikaans (afwiki).
Usage
To date, people have used the Reply Tool to post 250,000+ talk page comments.
New toolbar in Source mode
Yesterday, 5 August, the Source mode toolbar that was introduced as an opt-in setting in May, became available to all people who have the Reply Tool enabled by default. Note: you can still turn this toolbar off if you would like within Special:Preferences.
Offering the Reply Tool by default at more projects
In the coming weeks, we expect to be able to resume plans with offering the Reply Tool as a default-on feature for all users at all projects. Once the next set of wikis where the Reply Tool will be offered by default is finalized, we will post an update to this page.
For context, plans to offer the Reply Tool more broadly had been stalled while we worked with the Performance and Data Persistence Teams on infrastructure enhancements to ensure the Reply Tool continues to function as expected at this larger scale.
New toolbar in Source mode
As of Tuesday, 11 May, you can enable a toolbar within the Reply Tool's Source mode. This toolbar introduces easier ways for pinging other people and inserting links into the comments you are drafting.
To start, this new mode is being offered as an opt-in preference. You can enable it by taking the following steps
- Ensure you have the Reply Tool enabled
- Visit
Special:Preferences#mw-prefsection-editing - Locate the
Discussion pagessection - "Check" the checkbox next to the setting that reads:
Enable experimental tools in the quick replying and quick topic adding features' source modes - Click
Save - ✅ You are done. You should now see the new toolbar whenever you open the Reply Tool's Source mode
A/B test results
The results are in from the A/B test of the Reply Tool that ran from 11 February through 10 March on 22 Wikipedias. What follows are the conclusions we are drawing from these results and the steps we are taking next.
Conclusions
- The Reply Tool decreases disruption:
- There was a 79.5% decrease in the revert rate of comments Junior Contributors made with the Reply Tool compared to comments Junior Contributors made with page editing.
- There was no significant increase in the number of Junior Contributors who were blocked after publishing a comment with the Reply Tool
- The Reply Tool causes Junior Contributors to have more success publishing comments :
- 72.9% of Junior Contributors who opened the Reply Tool were able to publish at least one comment during the A/B test compared to 27.6% of Junior Contributors who attempted a comment using page editing. This amounts to a 160% increase in the comment completion rate of Junior Contributors who used the Reply Tool during the test than those who used page editing.