User blog comment:Dopp/Message Wall Now Available in Labs/@comment-65179-20120128000754/@comment-10370-20120128192104

We're not super crazy about the idea of stopping people from talking to each other :) -- but we're definitely interested in giving editors the space they need to do wiki work sometimes and catch up on conversations later. Wiki contributors need to see a single activity feed -- either Recent Wiki Activity or Recent Changes (or both) -- to keep track of everything that's going on. Unfortunately, that means that some kinds of activity (like talking to your friends) can drown out the wiki editing in the RC/Activity feed.

We're kicking around a couple ways to help with this problem. One idea is creating private message threads, where the Chatty Cathys can talk without getting in other people's way. There are some pretty obvious pros and cons to that one, so we're interested in hearing what people think.

Another idea is to make the filtering tools easier to use, both on RC and Wiki Activity. These would be optional add-ons -- we know not to mess with Classic Recent Changes tm. :) RC has the ability to exclude a namespace, but you can only exclude one at a time, and it resets when you come back to the page. We're thinking about making a more robust add-on which would let you mix and match between different modes -- maybe one for changes to articles/categories, one for photos/videos, one for messages/talk/forum/blogs, one for templates/MediaWiki, and one for everything. It would remember which one you were just using, so you could just focus on wiki work sometimes, and then catch up on talk stuff later. This idea really just exists in our heads right now, so there's a lot of room for figuring out how it would actually work. What do you think?