User:MPinchuk (WMF) (usurped)/sandbox

Zoom-in of what a topic header area might look like

Example of topic title containing some participant metadata

Background

We're building a discussion system with WikiProjects in mind. We want to make it fast and easy to skim through multiple long discussions on a single page and quickly get key information about any topic ( the who, what, and when?) at a glance. (You can check out the full feature set planned for our first release at Wikipedia:Flow/MVP.)

Hypothesis

We think including some meta-information about participants at the topic level would be useful for providing a scannable snapshot of that discussion (see images). We can display this information in a number of ways, so we need your help to come up with a sort and display method that makes sense and is useful.

Option 1 - chronological

• 1st position = Original poster
• 2nd Position = 2nd Poster
• 3rd Position = 3rd Poster
• 4th Position = "and XX others"

Tells you who began the discussion, who joined in, and when.

Option 2 - by number of topic level posts

• 1st position = Original poster
• 2nd Position = Poster with most topic level responses (replies to the topic, not replies to replies)
• 3rd Position = Poster with second most topic level responses (replies to the topic, not replies to replies)
• 4th Position = "and XX others"

Tells you who began the discussion and who's most actively responding to the topic (as opposed to going back and forth on a tangent with another user on the topic).

Option 3 - by total size of posts

• 1st position = Original poster
• 2nd Position = Poster with highest level of contribution (bytes)
• 3rd Position = Poster with second highest level of contribution (bytes)
• 4th Position = "and XX others"

Tells you who began the discussion and who's contributed the most text.

Option 4 - by mixture of 2 and 3 and total posts

• 1st position = Original poster
• 2nd Position = Poster with highest topic contribution metric (weighted mixture of top level of comments, replies to replies, bytes)
• 3rd Position = Poster with second highest topic contribution metric (weighted mixture of top level of comments, replies to replies, bytes)
• 4th Position = "and XX others"

Tells you who began the discussion and who's most vocal in it (posting the most text, responding to the topic and to other users).

Other ideas?

• ...?

Discuss!

Use the talk page to discuss: Which of these would you find useful (and why)? Which wouldn't be useful (and why not)?