Going to have concur on this. Flow and VE would be great for attracting new users, but leaving the foundation of the community in the dust in favor of innovation strikes me as a bad idea.
I support the idea of having the ability for the old methods of editing and talk pages to work when and where possible and for the transition to newer ideas to be as gentle as possible on those who might otherwise be alienated by the changes. > Date: Sat, 7 Jun 2014 02:39:17 +0200 > From: schneeschme...@googlemail.com > To: wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Subject: Re: [Wikitech-l] LiquidThreads - how do we kill it? > > 2014-06-06 22:28 GMT+02:00 S Page <sp...@wikimedia.org>: > > > The tone of your message made me want to cry, quit my job, and punch the > > wall in frustration :( > > I am sorry, S, this is certainly not what I intended. I apologise for > the tone of my last mail. > > > But I appreciate you being open about your dislike > > and suspicion of Flow, and can only hope that over time Flow's growing > > feature set leads users to *want* it enabled on the talk pages they visit. > > The most important point about everything new the WMF is currently > developing is that it really can frustrate and drive away even more > old editors. The WMF only talks about new editors, but does not take > into account that we need to keep the old ones in the first place. > > @Gerard: Losing old editors is the biggest cost of all those changes. > This is why we have to keep these as small as possible and we have to > avoid them wherever possible. There always has to be a switch for > disabling everything new and to return to the old state. > > To give you some more background: Our community has suffered a lot of > stress over the past years which results in frustration in many > places. Many long-time editors have gone inactive because of that. > Some of the stress is self-made, some came in from the German chapter, > mostly last year (this will hopefully change now), and some of the > stress comes from San Francisco. The latter stems mostly from new > developments in technical terms. Remember that this is only a small > community of only a few hundred regulars, and that we had to fight > against visual editor, and when media viewer was announced the first > question was whether it would still be possible to switch it off when > it would not be beta any more. Many of us are exhausted and tired to > fight against the Wikimedia bodies. > > That's why I interfere when there is talk about Flow. Both visual > editor and flow have the potential of providing another and perhaps > final blow to the still active old editor community. There is only one > community. We don't have another one as substitutes to take over. If a > wiki project is dead and broken once it will be broken forever. > > Regards, > Jürgen. > > _______________________________________________ > Wikitech-l mailing list > Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@lists.wikimedia.org https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
