Board Thread:Consensus Track/@comment-126761-20150623200352

Good morning Elder Scrolls fans!

As part of our ongoing work to try and help ensure articles display well across kinds of devices, we've been hard at work on a new article feature to update the way 'content notices' behave, 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 is a disambiguation page' or 'this article needs citations'. 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 separated out from the article content and given their own management tool. 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 Disambig notice would be relevant to all readers, but a Citation notice may only be relevant to logged-in contributors.) The layer of data would also allow for custom reports via Insights (e.g. an Insight list of all pages that have a stub flag.) 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 later), 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 is already live on a few communities, such as WARFRAME Wiki, The Maze Runner Wiki, 007 Wiki and Red Dead Wiki. We're really interested to see how it works on active, smart communities like yours, to help us understand how it works in real-world environments.
 * How can you help?

Any and all feedback on how it works will be invaluable, and will likely strongly influence future development in this area.

If you adopt Flags, we'll automatically convert usages of notice templates to the new type of code. (If it needs to be reversed, this is possible.) Afterwards, you'd use a new option on the 'Edit' button dropdown to choose which flags should appear on an article.
 * What would enabling it mean for your community?

You can view the current flags setup for your community on Special:Flags. This can't be edited yet (we're working on that functionality), but we're very happy to make tweaks to it in the meantime.

You can read lots more detail about how exactly the tool works on Help:Flags. The tool is under heavy development right now, and more abilities and options will be added as and when they are completed.

So - we'd love to hear your thoughts. We'll keep an eye on this thread for any feedback or questions you may have.

Thanks!

(Very random aside: I so wish could get past the first 20 mins of Skyrim. I'm super-jealous of my wife's ability to play open-ended games without going mad.) 