If you’ve ever been turned off by the arcane process of participating in discussions on the wiki, you might give the wiki another look. The operations team just installed the DiscussionTools extension, which adds a number of little features to make discussions on this wiki much more intuitive. Here are some highlights excerpted from the on-wiki announcement for those who are less familiar with the wiki.
Start a new topic without leaving the talk page. A live preview shows you what you’re about to post. The editor automatically signs your comment for you.
Reply to a comment inline without leaving the talk page. The editor automatically figures out the correct level of indentation and alerts you if someone else has replied in the meantime. Find other participants to ping by typing @.
Subscribe for notifications when someone comments on a section of a talk page. You no longer have to put the whole talk page and its article on your watchlist just to follow a specific discussion. A signature automatically becomes a permalink to an individual comment.
All these features work on mobile devices and with the visual editor. However, if you prefer to talk the old-fashioned away, you can still click “edit source” like normal.
DiscussionTools is no replacement for Discourse, but hopefully this removes some of the hurdles that cause even the best of us to miss discussions we started and lose track of who we’re replying to. There’s also some investigation into integrating the wiki with osm.org logins, which would remove a major barrier for mappers to participate in the wiki overall.
Do we actually need an alternative discussion mechanism to the forum?
I can see the benefits of some way of diacussing wiki changes, and back in the days when the talk@ list was the only option, I can see the point of wiki talk pages. The question is, do we need that mechanism today?
As long as we use MediaWiki, it comes with talk pages. As long as we have talk pages, we might as well make them reasonably usable.
I like Discourse a lot, but sometimes nitpicky discussions about articles – especially non-tagging-related articles – make sense to conduct as close to the article text as possible. Otherwise it’s just noise for everyone else.
Just tried it. Much easier. I agree that there is a risk of taking discussions out of the larger community, OTOH maybe a few specific issues are better kept apart from the forum. E.g. discussions about the wordings, paragraphs or images of a specific proposal.
Wiki is still better for fine-grained multi-topic discussion with sections and indents. Discourse made a deliberate design choice limiting itself with no nested threads.
People who try to take wiki or GitHub discussions to the forum for broader visibility sometimes get pushback for adding noise here. The forum has different social expectations, shaped by a different audience with different day-to-day priorities and different tools for staying organized.
If the forum moderators and governance team are interested in centralizing more discussion, a somewhat obvious step would be to enable Discourse Chat. This would create an alternative discussion stream with less formal expectations. Maybe some more wiki-related discussions would migrate here as a result – including wiki page workshopping discussions that currently take place on Slack/Discord/Telegram for a faster pace than either the forum or the wiki.
I think it may help to separate a few aspects here.
First, what you describe as “pushback” was, at least from my side, not meant as discouragement but as an attempt to clarify expectations and improve the signal-to-noise ratio. The forum has a different function than GitHub or the wiki, and feedback about format, scope, and clarity is part of normal community interaction, not moderation in the strict sense.
Second, I did not act in a moderator capacity in that discussion. My comments reflect a personal perspective as a community member trying to understand how others can meaningfully engage. Questions like “what kind of feedback is expected?” or suggestions about consolidation are meant to make participation easier, not to shut it down.
Third, regarding Discourse Chat: this is not something I (or most moderators here) can decide or enable. That would require involvement from the site administrators (@admins) and a broader discussion about whether it fits the goals of this forum. Moderators mainly handle content and community guidelines, not platform-level features.
I do agree with the underlying point that different communication channels serve different purposes, and it’s worth discussing how to best connect them. At the same time, simply adding another channel may not solve the core issue of where meaningful discussion actually happens and who participates.
So from my perspective, the question is less about enabling more channels, and more about how to structure posts in a way that makes it clear when and how community input is actually useful.
Rest assured, I don’t mean to single out your post as an example of moderator overreach or anything of the sort. To me it simply illustrates the difference in expectations well. On the forum, when you start a new topic, you’re starting an intentional conversation. Community members watch the latest topics and feel obligated to at least read it in a timely manner. With only a coarse category structure, the message goes out to a lot of people who don’t need to be bothered with “inside baseball” about a particular project within OSM, whether it’s the wiki or a particular GitHub project.
For better or worse, the wiki’s talk pages are more like OSM notes. You can throw some concern about a page on the talk page as a placeholder for future discussion. If you do want others to go out of their way to give feedback or fix something, you need to actively bring them into the conversation. One of the tools for doing that is pinging relevant wiki users. With DiscussionTools, you no longer need to remember the arcane {{ping|…}} syntax; instead you can use the same @ syntax as other modern sites like this forum. Once we combine it with future login integration, mappers will benefit tremendously from consistency between the different OSM sites.
In some cases, it’s good form to take a discussion to the broader community via this forum, just like if an OSM note or changeset discussion outgrows that space. We don’t have a standardized process for moving a discussion from the wiki to the forum. Maybe we’ll come up with something in the future as the need arises.
I’m aware of the moderators’ limited technical role. At the same time, previous discussions on enabling Discourse Chat (for other reasons) have shown that the moderators’ support for the idea will be critical and possibly decisive. This support means a lot more coming from a group who would be tasked with moderating something more freewheeling than a traditional forum.
Discourse Chat is my standard counteroffer when anyone here wonders why a mapper would even consider discussing anything outside of the forum. That sentiment comes from understandable frustration about our fragmented media landscape, but it grossly underestimates all that goes on in the OSM community and how unprepared the forum would be to handle an influx of refugees from some other discussion platform. Careful what you wish for and all that.
Copy link in different formats, referring to the section, and an obvious button: Now it’s a #c-theuser-thetimestamp-thesection full url parameter , permalink? Not using wiki internal links, very long, and implied at the timestamp
Collapsing threads
Watching for new comments when on page, and suggesting to refresh for showing them
No, the administrators agreed to remove the gadget for security reasons following a recent incident on Wikimedia wikis (not about Convenient Discussions specifically). That said, we currently can’t stop you from installing it as your own user script, as long as you’re aware of the potential risk of transcluding a personal user script from an external wiki.
I just added to a discussion, it proved a bit paintful. Why are links redireted to some tejo and failing? My try here Proposal talk:Route=mountaineering - OpenStreetMap Wiki after hurdles to get at least the link working. Still, it does look diffrent from what I know.
It sounds like you might be using the visual editor and running into a bug inserting a link to taginfo? There is a known issue with linking to Wikipedia within the visual editor, but I’m unaware of a similar issue for taginfo. As an alternative, you can switch to the Source tab, which accepts the wikitext syntax that you’re probably already familiar with.
