Forum:SH:Flags - a new way to maintain article notice boxes

Good morning Wookieepedia!

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 page contains major spoilers' or 'merging and redirecting this article may be desirable'. 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 Majorspoiler notice would be relevant to all readers, but a Mergeto 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 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?

We've set up a test community at http://starwars-test.wikia.com so that it can be tested out today. However, in order to ensure it doesn't interfere with Google search results, we have had to restrict access to recently active admins, who are free to add more users as admins so they can go take a look. It’s entirely separate to the main community - play with it to your heart’s content!

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 happy to make tweaks to it in the meantime.

And yes, it completely works in Monobook!

You can read 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 you may have.

Thanks! Kirkburn (talk) 20:22, June 22, 2015 (UTC)

Discussion
Note: tomorrow, a variety fixes and tweaks will be going live - including better logic around updates, improved logging, simple mobile support, and Special:Flags displaying the parameter settings (along with the data already listed). Kirkburn (talk) 20:22, June 22, 2015 (UTC)