Forum:Flags - a new way of dealing with content notices

Good morning Red Dead 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 article needs to be updated” or “this article contains spoilers”. Essentially, they are metadata for an article - communicating the status of that article, rather than being article content itself.

With Flags, the notice templates are be separated out from the article content and given their own management tool (Special:Flags). 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.
 * What does it do?

By adding a quick layer of data to these templates, communities will have more control over which notices appear to which people (e.g. a Spoiler notice would be relevant to all readers, but a Citations Needed notice would only be relevant to logged-in contributors.) The layer of data will also allow for custom reports via Insights (e.g. an Insight list of all pages that have a stub notice.) 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!

We have been working on a simple version of the Flags tool, which we've just enabled on this community for testing. Any feedback on how it works will be invaluable, and will likely strongly influence future development in this area.
 * How can you help?

We've automatically convert usages of notice templates to the new type of code. (If it needs to be reversed, this is possible.)
 * What does this mean for your community?

Users can then choose which content notices will appear on an article via an option (called ‘Flags’) under the Edit menu, or via a new tab in Monobook. The available Flags are listed on Special:Flags.

Apologies for the late notice about this - due to a bit of miscommunication, the test went live on this community before we had a chance to post this. However, now that it is live, we do hope you like it!

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! Kirkburn (talk) 15:29, June 9, 2015 (UTC)