Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-Kirkburn-20150615214526
Good morning Maze Runner Wiki!
As part of our ongoing work to try and help ensure articles work well across kinds of devices, we've been hard at work on a new article feature to update the way 'content notices' work, which we’re calling Flags.
What we’re talking about are the kinds of notice templates you see at the top of articles with information like 'this content is unreleased' or 'this page is a candidate for deletion'. Essentially, they are metadata for an article - communicating the status of that article, rather than being article content itself.
- What does it do?
With Flags, the notice templates are be separated out from the article content and given their own management tool. They still use the exact same templates as before (and you can continue to create new ones and update existing templates, just as you do today) - but now users can browse, add and remove them without resorting to fairly specific knowledge of how the varied templates work.
By adding a quick layer of data to these templates, communities will have more control over which notices appear to which people (e.g. an Unreleased notice would be relevant to all readers, but a Speedydelete notice may only be relevant to logged-in contributors.) The layer of data would also allow for custom reports via Insights (e.g. an Insight list of all pages that have a stub flag.) The content of these templates will no longer clutter Google and on-Wikia search results, and we’ll be able to display abbreviated versions of the notices on mobile phones.
Other potential ideas include mobile users easily being able to mark pages that need work (e.g. you notice a page is full of typos, and flag it for yourself or others to improve), or even modifying how the page behaves based on the flags (e.g. hiding spoiler article text from on-Wikia search results). If you have more ideas around this, we’d love to hear them!
- How can you help?
We have been working on a simple version of the Flags tool, and - after discussion with Rider ranger47 - we're looking to enable it on this wikia very soon. We're really interested to see how it works on active, smart communities like yours, to help us understand how it works in real-world environments.
Any and all feedback on how it works will be invaluable, and will likely strongly influence future development in this area.
- What would this mean for your community?
We'll automatically convert usages of notice templates to the new type of code. (If it needs to be reversed, this is possible.) Afterwards, you'd use a new option on the 'Edit' button dropdown to choose which flags should appear on an article.
You can read more detail about how exactly the tool works on Help:Flags!
The tool is under heavy development right now, and more abilities and options will be added as and when they are completed. We'll keep an eye on this thread for any feedback you may have.
Thanks! <ac_metadata title="Flags - a new way to maintain article notice boxes" notify_everyone="1434409877"> </ac_metadata>
