User:Oiyarbepsy/Wikitalk and Flow:The Best of Both Worlds

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The best talk page system for the future of Wikipedia might be the right combination of Flow and traditional wikitext markup. Both have significant advantages over the other. For Flow, we have the ease of use, the permanent linking and the effortless archiving, among other features. All of our processes are based on wikitext which has a huge flexibility that Flow could never hope to match. The proposal would be to modify the current Flow software to serve as a container for wikitext discussions.

In this proposal, each individual discussion topic would be in its own page - either a subpage of the talk page (pictured) or on a page in the Topic namespace created for Flow. The window that currently holds the original post in Flow would instead show the current contents of that wikitext discussion page. New posts and replies would be removed from Flow and instead be incorporated into a version of Visual Editor that is designed for talk pages. Since each discussion is wikitext, it would retain all of the current flexibility, and all of our current processes would continue to function (except those no longer needed, such as archiving).

Flow would handle all the notes and bolts of the system. For example, when hitting the new topic button, Flow would automatically create the new page and display it on the talk page once the user has entered the initial comment. It would also add the new discussion page to the watchlist of everyone that wants new topics on their watch list. Flow would no longer need a search function, as the existing search function would simply search the talk page and all sub-pages.

The mockup on this page shows what this system might look like, except it would look better than this. The permanent links in the mockups actually are real links, BTW, and these are real Flow topics, visible at Topic:S7fijf7mt6qjh7a2 and Topic:S7fii863nue66tsd. The images have been modified from these posts.

See also