On 19 March 2015 at 11:08, Jon Robson <jdlrob...@gmail.com> wrote: > 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. > > The dogfooding has been happening for a while on WMF's own office-wiki. We haven't heard any results about that. Is the system being used more than the wikitext system? (i.e., are there more "talk page" comments now than there were before?) Have users expressed satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the system? Have they been surveyed? Do they break down into groups (e.g., engineering loves it, grants hates it, etc...)? I hear some stories (including stories that suggest some groups of staff have pretty much abandoned talk pages on office-wiki and are now reverting to emails instead) but without any documentary evidence or analysis it's unreasonable to think that it is either a net positive OR a net negative.
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