On 19 Mar 2015 7:55 am, "Brad Jorsch (Anomie)" <bjor...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > > On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 9:42 PM, Danny Horn <dh...@wikimedia.org> wrote: > > > Brad: unfortunately, it's really hard to tell very much from a conversation > > with messages like "3: Post C: reply to Post A". You could do that with the > > old model, the new model or the perfect magic Nobel-Prize-winning > > discussion threading still to be discovered, and it would probably look > > like nonsense in all three. > > > > I shouldn't have used both numbers and post-names, but once I realized that > it was already a bit late and it won't let me edit those posts. Someone > with appropriate permissions is free to go back and edit them all to remove > the number prefix and let the alphabetical order of the post-names suffice > to indicate the chronological order of the postings, if that would make it > less confusing for you. > > The point is the structure you're displaying doesn't make any sense, not > that the content of my messages isn't anything that might make sense on its > own. My "content" is explicitly simplified to illustrate the failings in > the displayed structure. Structure should *facilitate* understanding, but > in your demo I'd find that understanding the underlying structure of the > conversation would be *despite* the broken display-structure. > > Nor is the point that people can screw up wikitext talk pages in ways that > are even more confusing. That's a given, but Flow is supposed to do better. > Right now it's worse than a well-formatted wikitext talk page (which has > the advantage that human users can *fix* the structure when a newbie breaks > it). > > Comparing http://flow-tests.wmflabs.org/wiki/Wikitext version of > Topic:Sdrqdcffddyz0jeo to > http://flow-tests.wmflabs.org/wiki/Wikitext_version_of_Topic:Sdrqdcffddyz0jeo , > I find it much easier in the latter to see what is a reply to what. > > > > We've tried in our testing to pretend that we're having real conversations, > > so we could see whether there's any logical way to get to eight levels of > > nested threading. It's not easy to organize make-believe conversations, > > but if you want to start a thread, I'd be happy to fire up a few > > sockpuppets and pretend to talk about something with you. > > > > No thanks. Pretend "real" conversations are ok for a first assessment at > usability, but by nature they're likely to be vapid and unlikely to have > the inter-post complexity of actual conversations on-wiki where people are > concentrating on actually communicating rather than on forcing a > conversation for the sake of testing. >
Let's all be happy then that we are replacing an unloved broken talk extension with Flow on a wiki where we have real conversations then ...? :) actually dogfooding will make it much easier for us to communicate errors with the Flow team and help improve the software. I truly hope that soon we can get to a point where we can enable flow on all pages on mediawiki.org and this seems like the obvious first step. _______________________________enable __________ > 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
