This page is currently inactive and is retained for
historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
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. [1]
LiquidThreads replaces discussion pages with actual forums, giving the following benefits:
Wiki discussion pages have some advantages over web and Usenet forums. They allow use of the entire wiki syntax - from images to wiki links to transclusion. It is possible to refactor entire discussion pages.
Web forums offer a number of advantages over the MediaWiki talk page model:
LiquidThreads aims to unite the advantages of both forum types, and to add some unique discussion features to boot.
Each thread can have a summary. The aim of this feature is to summarize a discussion up to some point, a summarization is not the end point of the discussion. In fact the summary should be continuously maintained while the discussion proceeds.
This page is currently inactive and is retained for
historical reference. Either the page is no longer relevant or consensus on its purpose has become unclear. To revive discussion, seek broader input via a forum such as the village pump. |
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. [1]
LiquidThreads replaces discussion pages with actual forums, giving the following benefits:
Wiki discussion pages have some advantages over web and Usenet forums. They allow use of the entire wiki syntax - from images to wiki links to transclusion. It is possible to refactor entire discussion pages.
Web forums offer a number of advantages over the MediaWiki talk page model:
LiquidThreads aims to unite the advantages of both forum types, and to add some unique discussion features to boot.
Each thread can have a summary. The aim of this feature is to summarize a discussion up to some point, a summarization is not the end point of the discussion. In fact the summary should be continuously maintained while the discussion proceeds.