Thread:Feedback/Social effects of quoting/Gmaxwell (4)

I thought it did too, but I misunderstood Erik and thought was saying otherwise.

There is still a workflow issue: The moment you decide to reply isn't (often? usually?) the moment when you'll realize that you'll need to quote.

If the quote facilitation feature remains would be nice if there was some mediawiki markup for referenced quoting so that the quote is enclosed in some block element so that it can get special markup, i.e.

 I don't agree; quoting is an important feature to have when you don't have the ability to write in-line replies like you do in regular wiki talk pages. It would be even nicer to be able to anchor responses more specifically to a part of the parent post (Google Wave has that feature), but without that, being able to easily reference pieces of a long post is an essential feature. ※

Doesn't that look nice? The special colourization, positioning, and graphical style will help readers who are reading over the whole thread skip reading the quotes unless they realize they need them for context.

Having the reference baked into the auto-generated quotes will encourage people to provide it... and the handy reference will make it more justifiable to trim ruthlessly: If the trimming has taken away too much context the reader can simply click to see the rest. I'd even argue for displaying an unclickable ※ when a reference is not provided in the quotation tag to subtly emphasize that references are customary and expected, and set the default font size used in the quotation based on the amount of quoted text starting at slightly smaller than the normal text size and clamped to 70% so that if you quote a lot you end up with munchkin text (but still allowing someone to manually style the element if they have a good reason to override the default shrinkage).

If the referenced location is a post on the current page the reference should be an automatically generated relative link to an anchor so clicking it doesn't send you to another page if its right here. External links should also be allowed, but get the external link marker... and obviously the quoting feature in the software can't help build links to external resources, but the existence of the quoting tool should make it easy for users to learn how the quoting markup works.

A simple XML-like tag for this kind of quote display would be fine and would facilitate easy trimming and quoting from multiple places, for example:  … 

It may be even better to put quotes in a small box that is strictly limited to one line, with a show/hide button with the starting state controlled by user preference but defaulting to hide... but the appropriate site JS isn't setup here so I can't really mock it up.

  …   ※  [show↷]       I don't agree; quoting is an important feature to have when you don't have the ability to write in-line replies like you do in regular wiki talk pages. It would be even nicer to be able to anchor responses more specifically to a part of the parent post (Google Wave has that feature), but without that, being able to easily reference pieces of a long post is an essential feature. Or something like that, but with a working show button that expands the area and makes it look like the above quote. Notice that the reference is not trimmed out. This would also encourage trimming since only one line of the quote is displayed by default. I'm not sure how cross-browser reliable the CSS overflow clipping I used here is, if its not the software could simply trim the text to a few words.