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Initial Feedback Request: "Show FAQ" template

[edit]
Pinging contributors to Talk:2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine/FAQ for feedback: ProcrastinatingReader, Melmann, JaventheAlderick, Fephisto, Phiarc, Emir of Wikipedia, CIreland

Recent experience with Talk:2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine made it clear some editors overlook/ignore the {{FAQ}} resource at the top of a talk page. This new template is designed to reference existing FAQ answers individually and succinctly within a discussion. {{Show FAQ|4}} for example can link directly to question 4 on the FAQ content page or include the actual Q+A text to the right of the discussion. To illustrate, this discussion has made use of {{Show FAQ|3}}. That specific question should appear duplicated from the FAQ at the top.

My hope is that this template:

  1. draws more attention to the existence of the FAQ which is sometimes "buried" in a bunch of talk page notices
  2. makes it easier for editors familiar with common questions to respond quickly

You can read complete details at the temporary home for the template: User:N8wilson/Show FAQ. Comments, questions, suggestions and feedback welcome and appreciated. Thanks for your contributions to the Talk:2022 Russian invasion of Ukraine/FAQ. --N8 22:10, 11 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]

Hi. Not a bad idea. Some concerns I have with implementation:
  1. The box being on the right hand side means it can easily be missed. It actually took me a second to see it while I was reading your prose. Also, I feel like the 'yellow' colour has become one my brain naturally wants to ignore, given the mess of talk page banners, so that may need some change too.
  2. A critical limitation is that these banners unfortunately cannot be seen on mobiles, which is an inherent issue with {{FAQ}} but applies to any kind of template using 'tmboxes'. See here [1] for demo. ProcrastinatingReader (talk) 00:46, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
I do very much like the step of embedding FAQ questions into the discussions, this has lots of potential as it forces the discussion OP to see the FAQ instead ignoring it as they do now. I concur with ProcrastinatingReader that the placement is still probably not prominent enough, and the mobile interface issue is there.
What if the template allowed to reply with the FAQ question? Maybe an option {{ReplyWithFAQ|X}} where X is the question number, and it would transclude the content of the FAQ question and answer, directly inline of the reply?
In any case, this is still very much a step forward. Melmann 13:31, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]
This is really helpful - thanks @ProcrastinatingReader & @Melmann.
Looks like everything on mobile above the first section header gets hidden. So the only technical way I currently see to surface the FAQ is within a discussion-style L2 section header and that goes for the whole FAQ or individually transcluded Q+As. Please correct if you know otherwise.
Actually, after some thought on it, I'm not completely against doing exactly that. For all the yellow notices we see on desktop view, the FAQ is the only one (AFAIK) that actually represents previous and oft-rehashed discussion topics. So in a way, it might actually fit to "pin" the FAQ (or some brief variant of it) as a first section header. Conveniently, if this section is just a trancslusion, it can also sidestep the auto-archiving. That bug ... <ahem>, "feature" is definitely hack-y though.
I appreciate the presentation concerns too. I'm totally open to design changes but I think it will be helpful to hash out the mobile possibility first as that would require "deeper" template changes likely impacting/limiting overall ability to design. Along those lines and related to the {{ReplyWithFAQ|x}} idea, I had originally hoped to pull in the text of a Q+A combination as part of an inline reply. My first attempt does work on mobile but, like the sidestepping the auto-archives, it's also quite hack-y.
The two options I see for moving on this are:
  1. Start adapting templates for use in a "pinned" discussion with an L2 header to accommodate mobile, inline replies, and the reply tool.
  2. Adjust design params to refine the non-mobile version and migrate to main Template namespace.
I'm also just now noticing that the current version may not work with the new reply tool being rolled out site wide. I think trying to accommodate mobile as described (L2 section for FAQ) might be able to overcome that hurdle as well because it would probably mean inline templates.
Again - thanks for feedback and I welcome any further thoughts on this. Feel free to ping editors that might also care to review. --N8 23:11, 12 March 2022 (UTC)[reply]