Last modified: 2014-04-28 02:27:37 UTC
When you create a new Flow thread, there's a "topic" field. This topic field is analogous to the "subject" field in a wikitext talk page. The topic field currently cannot support wikitext. Example: http://ee-flow.wmflabs.org/w/index.php?title=Sandbox&workflow=0509a3b2518b34dffb6efa163e68c4ac&action=view Topic input: "here's a new [[topic]]" Expected behavior: "[[topic]]" becomes an internal hyperlink
Wikitext is purposefully Plain text only. IIRC, these are the reasons why: *Links: ** Links generally shouldn't be in headers, because the bolded text makes it harder for some people to see that the link is there. ** Plus it's generally counter to the (Enwiki) styleguides [[WP:LINKSTYLE]] and [[WP:Header]]. (Although, do any other projects make a standard practice of including links in section headers?) ** Also "editors who have their preferences set to edit sections by clicking on the header will not be able to click these links" - [[Help:Section#Section_linking]] (Although this might not apply to Flow) ** Flow currently uses most of the topic-title as a clickable area to trigger the topic-collapse. This would conflict with wikilinks. *Italics: ** I agree that this should be allowed. We need italics for proper formatting of things like media titles, court cases, etc, in Enwiki. ([[WP:ITALICS]]) *Other? ** Is there any other wikitext that topic titles might need?
(In reply to comment #1) > ** Links generally shouldn't be in headers, because the bolded text makes it > harder for some people to see that the link is there. When I look at [[WP:AN]] and [[WP:AN/I]], I see many headers that contain links. When I look at [[User talk:Quiddity]] ([[Special:Permalink/581983546]]), I see headers containing italics and links. What are you talking about? > ** Plus it's generally counter to the (Enwiki) styleguides [[WP:LINKSTYLE]] > and [[WP:Header]]. I'm not sure what you're talking about here. The style guidelines you're linking to obviously apply only to content, not to discussions. Flow is specifically focused on discussions (non-content). Your links seem completely irrelevant. > *Other? > ** Is there any other wikitext that topic titles might need? Magic words, covered by a separate bug. External links. Bold. Probably a million other pieces of formatting.
(In reply to comment #1) > Wikitext is purposefully Plain text only. s/Wikitext is/Topic-titles are/ Sorry. (In reply to comment #2) > (In reply to comment #1) > > *Other? > > ** Is there any other wikitext that topic titles might need? > > Magic words, covered by a separate bug. External links. Bold. Probably a > million other pieces of formatting. Bold is never (?) needed in topic titles. Unless there are foreign language projects that require it? External links will presumably follow whatever decision we arrive at with internal wikilinks. I'll ask the team to give more details, and potentially reconsider certain aspects (particularly italics).
The WMF core features team tracks this bug on Mingle card https://mingle.corp.wikimedia.org/projects/flow/cards/471, but people from the community are welcome to contribute here and in Gerrit.
With wikitext, it's sort of all or nothing; it would be a huge pain to disallow all wikitext except, say, italics. Of course, if anybody out there thinks it's easy, patches welcome ;) Since this is just the MVP, I think it makes sense to keep things simple for now and just keep titles in plaintext. If there's a demonstrable need to have wikitext in titles that outweighs all the cons, it's something we can easily change.
(In reply to comment #5) > With wikitext, it's sort of all or nothing; it would be a huge pain to > disallow all wikitext except, say, italics. Of course, if anybody out there > thinks it's easy, patches welcome ;) This bug tracker keeps bugs open if patches are welcome. We'll just adjust the importance/priority to lowest/enhancement, I suppose. For what it's worth, we implement partial parsers in weird places. Consider edit summaries, which auto-link internal links, but don't auto-link external links and magic links and don't allow formatting such as bold or italics. Not that we really should continue this practice of creating new partial parsers... but it's certainly not unprecedented. > Since this is just the MVP, I think it makes sense to keep things simple for > now and just keep titles in plaintext. The most valuable player? Sorry, I don't know what "MVP" means. > If there's a demonstrable need to have wikitext in titles that outweighs all > the cons, it's something we can easily change. Having watched the train wreck that was VisualEditor's deployment, I can that it's often small 'features' like this that can potentially be a very big deal to a wiki and its workflows. If you look at a process such as [[WP:RFPP]], you can see a half-dozen links in many headers, each of which correspond to discrete units of work. I think attempting to de-wikify the topic title may result in a lot of annoyed users.
(In reply to comment #6) > (In reply to comment #5) > > With wikitext, it's sort of all or nothing; it would be a huge pain to > > disallow all wikitext except, say, italics. Of course, if anybody out there > > thinks it's easy, patches welcome ;) > > This bug tracker keeps bugs open if patches are welcome. We'll just adjust > the > importance/priority to lowest/enhancement, I suppose. > > For what it's worth, we implement partial parsers in weird places. Consider > edit summaries, which auto-link internal links, but don't auto-link external > links and magic links and don't allow formatting such as bold or italics. Not > that we really should continue this practice of creating new partial > parsers... > but it's certainly not unprecedented. > > > Since this is just the MVP, I think it makes sense to keep things simple for > > now and just keep titles in plaintext. > > The most valuable player? Sorry, I don't know what "MVP" means. > "Minimum viable product". Basically it's designed to be just complete enough that we can show it off without it falling over. An example would be Page Curation, where we deployed in a really, really unfinished form and then developed where people could see it. (actually, page curation is not the best example since it broke blocking for ~20 minutes, somehow. But.) Title linking may (heck, probably will) be necessary for the finished thing, but it's not necessary for the "demo model"; while it'd be nice to have, I would rather we made the features we do have work. > > If there's a demonstrable need to have wikitext in titles that outweighs all > > the cons, it's something we can easily change. > > Having watched the train wreck that was VisualEditor's deployment, I can that > it's often small 'features' like this that can potentially be a very big deal > to a wiki and its workflows. If you look at a process such as [[WP:RFPP]], > you > can see a half-dozen links in many headers, each of which correspond to > discrete units of work. I think attempting to de-wikify the topic title may > result in a lot of annoyed users. I agree it'll be a big deal, but this is the MVP; if there's a need, we can build it into the next release.
(In reply to comment #7) Thanks for the clarifications. :-)
Links in headers are definitely needed in final product! Links are often used on "specialty pages" like image workshops or administrators noticeboards to quickly give a link to the file/user in question (which/whom the whole topic is about).
