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If this goes life, I will not use it. As not using your talk page is not compatible with being an admin, I'll have to give up the tools, which I will do, of course. I might even stop editing altogether. -- Randykitty ( talk) 10:15, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
So, he at least is happy for you to leave: in fact, quite prepared to dissolve the people and elect another. Deltahedron ( talk) 16:44, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
The View History page for Wikipedia:Co-op/Mentorship_match doesn't have all the usual "stuff" (e.g. Revision history search, et. al.) -- is that a test artifact? NE Ent 23:33, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
I posted on the teahouse board as a test, and yesterday SmokeyJoe replied to it. Today, I received the signpost in my talk, so it created two notifications and the little red button said 2. However, on clicking, the popup window was overidden by the Flow notifications, so I was unable to see my second notification that did not have to do anything with Flow. Only by going to the full page Special:Notifications was I able to see my message. KonveyorBelt 15:18, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
The notifications system continues to alert me on my notifications about a post that was posted six months ago with my user name linked. This appears to be Flow-related, so posting here. See: Topic on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Breakfast. NorthAmerica 1000 04:50, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
Am I the only one to get a strange "No formatting defined for notification." red line in the middle of my "messages"? Fram ( talk) 09:22, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
It wont let me hide or delete vandalism posted on flow enabled talk pages. When I click hid, it pops up the hide window, but wont accept input, or let me click the hide button. Same for delete. Running MonoBook on Firefox. Monty 845 17:49, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Flow test. Really?
You claim on WP:FLOW, about deployments to anywhere else, that "All deployment ideas are preliminary; actual rollout depends on conversations with staff and community stakeholders. These can be unlocked when we meet our goals for the quarter." And then you don't contact any "community stakeholders" (who would that be? You simply mean the editing community, I presume, but prefer management terms apparently), but just start with another Flow page, despite people clearly expressing serious doubts about Flow at the Teahouse (here, and at the discussion I started at the Teahouse since you apparently forgot that).
It seems that you will fit in nicely with the majority of the WMF people we encounter here (with my apologies to the few that do deserve our repect for trying to really engage the editors here in an open and constructive way). And that Flow will fit in nicely with the majority of WMF deployments as well.
We can't delete the page you started, we can't disable Flow from it, we can't move it away from the Teahouse to your user space (three times very convenient for you), so I have fully protected it. If you want to roll out Flow any further, first discuss it, get some semblance of consensus, and then act upon it. And, of course, if you want that consensus, that agreement, then first seriously improve Flow. You have three pages here were you can test it, you have the whole of Mediawiki, you can enable Flow on the WMF homesite as much as you like. But don't use enwiki as your private testing ground, I thought the WMF had at least learned that much by now, but clearly I was wrong. Fram ( talk) 07:49, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
I have given Wikipedia:Co-op/Mentorship match the same treatment, even though that page has one enwiki editor supporting it. Flow should not be rolled out any further without some serious discussion, not this "let's hope no one will notice it" approach. Fram ( talk) 10:14, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
@ Quiddity (WMF): (and other WMF people involved in this debacle): You claimed above, quite emphatically, in a response to all this: "Note: Those 2 test pages were specifically asked for, by editors who want to brainstorm and test potential gadgets and scripts to work with Flow." Could you please, just as emphatically, state that this was a mistake on your part, that no such thing was asked for at the Teahouse, and that most editors there were quite clearly against enabling Flow at the moment? And could you then perhaps as well delete that page, as an unwanted implementation of new, buggy software against the wishes of most involved editors? Fram ( talk) 08:39, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
At mw:Wikimedia Engineering/2014-15 Goals we read that for WMFQ1, what the rest of us call July-September 2014, number 3 on the list of "Top departmental priorities" we can expect 3) Deploy Flow to significant Wikipedia use case (in consideration: Teahouse or similar workflow) with the caveat Teahouse is a major use case, there are a fair number of must-have features still outstanding to support it well, and we may not be able to get all the way there in Q1. I realise that these Goals are subject to change like everything in the sublunary world, but it looks as if this was particularly visionary. It also looks as if the required community consensus is likely to be absent for a long time to come. Presumably a major rewrite of those goals is to be expected? I hope that in the light of the controversy above, a very serious attempt will be made to rebuld the consensus before writing another goal of this nature, namely one that imposes Flow on a significant working part of the Englis Wikipedia? Deltahedron ( talk) 20:36, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
So, User:DannyH (WMF), when are you going to
You're the product manager, you are responsible for the implementation of these changes, you are responsible for the eventual acceptance of Flow by the community (if ever), and you are responsible for the mess of the last week. Just keeping quiet (or only responding to the easy questions and ignoring the more embarassing or hard ones) may seem preferable to you now, but (at least for me) the result is that I'll never trust you on anything Flow-related in the future. My impression from most comments is that there is already an extreme reluctance by many editors and admins (or "community stakeholders" in the WMF newspeak) to ever consider Flow as a possible replacement. You won't be able to give grants to every page in return for using Flow, so you'll have to find another solution. Communication and honesty may help. Having good, thoroughly tested software is also beneficial of course. Fram ( talk) 07:16, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
I have a red 1 next to my user name atop the page. When I click on it, I see I've been mentioned on a Flow page, but the red 1 remains. If I click on the message, I'm taken to the page "[f830b7d3] 2014-09-08 13:14:23: Fatal exception of type MWException" (side point: why are the exceptions so non-specifically named?) and the red 1 remains. There seems to be no way of removing the red 1, no matter what I try doing. -- Ypnypn ( talk) 13:15, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
I think keeping track of new posts on watched pages is genuinely a job for the watchlist, not for Echo. And the watchlist should easily be able to handle it, if Flow is properly integrated with it. After all, normal talk pages also generate watchlist entries for each added/edited post. Of course "properly integrated" includes respecting user preferences like grouping and showing all vs. the latest changes.
One could discuss having an Echo notification type for new watchlist entries, but then for all of them, not just those coming from Flow. And if introduced, this type of notification should definitely not be enabled by default for existing users (it might be useful for new users to make them aware of their watchlist though). The only argument I read (unfortunately not here, forgot where) for direct notifications about Flow activity was that new users don't know how to use their watchlist. That is indeed a problem, but I think direct Flow notifications are far from being a reasonable solution:
TLDR: Please integrate Flow with the watchlist (RC, history, contribs etc.) in the same way as normal pages/talkpages. Please don't use Echo as a Flow-watchlist. Please allow for a discussion of major changes in the respective roles of watchlists and notifications before implementing them. — HHHIPPO 19:18, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
Maybe you need to be reminded again: Flow is not ready for deployment. It lacks basic functions and its look and feel is completely different from the rest of Wikipedia. Newbies need to learn about Wikipedia as it is, not as you hope it will be some times in the future. So please don't bother them with Flow or any other pre-alpha software. This request applies to the Teahouse as well as the co-op and any other page where newbies are expected in relevant numbers. -- h-stt !? 16:42, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
I can see that it is time-consuming and somewhat inefficient for WMF staff to keep revisiting design decisions that have already been made a year ago, with users who were, for whatever reason, not involved in those discussions, raising questions and issues that will all have been considered and resolved during the planning process. As I think I suggested above, perhaps the relevant design documents, with the decisions and the reasoning behind them, which will have been generated during the design and planning process, could be posted, or pointed to? That way users can simply read off the answers to their questions without wating too much staff time. Deltahedron ( talk) 18:06, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
Danny, one thing that would help is if WP:FLOW could be written more clearly, with a detailed summary in the lead, highlighting the issues that Wikipedians are going to care about. For example, it is true that the Foundation is effectively proposing to abolish talk pages? What is going to happen to current and future archives? Is it true that Flow will have infinite scrolling (as with Twitter)? I keep seeing these issues raised on this page, but can't work out whether people simply fear these things are the case, or whether they really are. Some very plain speaking would help a lot. SlimVirgin (talk) 23:48, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
I was surprised to discover that mw:Flow/User_stories is currently a blank page. If there are no user stories, perhaps the discussions here are now moot? Or are they going to be rebooted too? Deltahedron ( talk) 17:08, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
@ Erik Moeller (WMF):: in a post here, you claim (about the difference between the transclusion we normally get vs. the substitution Flow automatically does) that
"Contrary to some descriptions, it's not quite the same as {{subst:}}ing the template. You can still get back to the wikitext used produce the output, and change it, and potentially re-parse it. It just doesn't do so automatically (which is also not an inherent limitation). "
If I substitute something, I get the wikitext it produced, I can change it, and reparse it. Or I can change the source (template, whatever) and re-substitute it. How exactly is what Flow does "not quite the same"? If it is exactly the same, then why did you claim otherwise? In any case, why not leave the choice to editors whether they want to transclude or substitute it? Fram ( talk) 07:31, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
We (enWiki) have some bots which edit talk pages (and not just archiving bots and signature bots). For this functionality to continue, "what links here" must work, and those bots must be able to edit Flow messages. This also damages the stability of template expansion mentioned above. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 04:44, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
Erik states above that "because you can't easily switch back and forth once you convert a page, we need to move very carefully." In the archives of talk:Wikiproject breakfast I see that we were told "What will happen to this pages contents when the trial ends? We can't turn wikitext into Flow posts, but we can turn Flow posts back to wikitext – so your discussions will be preserved and returned to you". These two statements don't seem consistent. Can someone please clarify this? Dougweller ( talk) 14:37, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Breakfast about black genitalia? The file seems to have been deleted but it the topic is still here. @ Quiddity (WMF): you've supposedly hidden a topic there, but the topic heading is still there. I've suggested we go back to a normal talk page. Dougweller ( talk) 13:30, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
I still have two 10 day old messages and one 6 month old one alerting me to changes on the Talk:Flow/Developer test page. That's all I see unless I click on "All notifications". And why does the red box say 1? Dougweller ( talk) 16:37, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
I think the rollout of Flow might be more successful if it was just a rollout of Flow. Currently, the rollout includes many changes unrelated to Flow. For example: gray text, limited editing of others' comments, lots of whitespace, etc. These changes may be right or wrong, but they have nothing to do with Flow (why is gray text only needed for discussions, not articles?). Combining all of them into Flow is causing more conflict than necessary. I suggest that the rollout of Flow be focused on just Flow, and leave other changes to a separate project. -- Ypnypn ( talk) 16:46, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
So, Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Flow test has been deleted, thanks. It seems that User:Xaosflux had the honours. A few questions
Please remind me who thought that this was even remotely ready to be deployed to a live environment? This is a troll- and vandal-magnet the way it is now.
Can you please finally agree to postpone all further implementations (outside mediawiki or testwiki or labs) until you get the basic functionalities to work? Fram ( talk) 06:40, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
- Rename [[Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Flow_test]] to [[Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/ExperimentalFlowRoom]]
- Reply • 2 comments • 20:49, 9 September 2014
- Ad Huikeshoven
- The main objection to this page as I understand is the word "test" in the name. The intention is to experiment in the Teahouse with using Flow as the interaction tool. Another name might be a better fit for that use.
- Fram
- Ad Huikeshoven: Since you clearly don't understand the issues at hand, perhaps it is better if you just drop this?
@ DannyH (WMF): you usually ignore my questions, but perhaps you can check at least this issue and indicate whether this works as expected? I'll not bother you about the issue that many edits made in Flow (to live pages and topics, nothing hidden or deleted) do not show up in ones contributions, I understand from other reactions that WMF people seem to think that this is a feature, not a bug anyway; but when we finally can test one page for deletion (indirectly, but it's a start), some seven months after this rather basic functionality was requested, it turns out that almost everything that could be wrong with it, is indeed wrong with it.
So I'ld like to know: why has a system that can not be properly tracked, removed, maintained, ... been rolled out to a live environment, with the clear intention (and attempts) to expand and speed up this rollout, and with promises that everything was reversible when obviously this has never been tested (or at least not successfully)? When you ask us to test things, shouldn't you be A) reasonably certain that it works for most cases and B) willing and able to reverse everything if it turns out to go wrong anyway? The past two weeks have been one deluge of major problems. Fram ( talk) 17:29, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
Preliminary: when was the Topic namespace announced here (at enwiki I mean), and when was it implemented? Seems to have been done very hush-hush, but I may simply have missed it. Is a rather serious design decision, to replace all talk namespaces eventually with only one namespace, and something that just perhaps warrants some discussion?
Current problem: there are quite a few recent changes to the Topic namespace ( [4]). But these can not be found in the user contributions when searching for the Topic namespace (e.g. [5] or [6] or [7] don't give any Topic namespace contributions (which they clearly have).
Could the devs perhaps not roll out a complete new namespace before it has been tested somewhat to see that the most basic functionalities actually work? Fram ( talk) 08:46, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
And before people think "oh, contributions simply don't go to the topics namespace yet", some apparently do, as we have this. One of them is even not the current one. Mind you, I can't see easily if this is correct, as (just like I noted below) the history returns an error...
Strange (worrying for those of you that still worry about Flow) is that the dates indicated at that page don't match the dates indicated at the actual Flow topics. This seems to be not only totally unusable, but also totally unreliable and corrupt. Rather unlike the WMF, where I have no indications of any corruptness. Fram ( talk) 17:06, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
Had a Flow page entry in my contributions, clicked on "hist" and got a completely white page with the text
"[958a135f] 2014-09-08 16:37:25: Fatal exception of type MWException" [12]
If I go to Wikipedia talk:Flow/Developer test page and try the same (click on History), I get the same error. Perhaps an indication that they have started removing Flow from enwiki? (Hey, one can always hope :-D ) Fram ( talk) 16:40, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
I have no idea where this came from, but when trying to exit pages with Flow on this project, I am now getting the standard microsoft "are you sure you want to leave this page?" pop-up, and I have to decide whether to leave or stay on the page before moving on. This has happened with both Firefox and IE9 in the last few days. Could we please not have that? It's one thing for a warning message when one is mid-edit and about to leave a page, but simply viewing a page shouldn't have this result. Risker ( talk) 16:53, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
As of now, I made the last edit to the page. It is in the table of expected functionality. I wrote that when Flow is perfect, the user will be able to bring the latest post to the top of the list, and then follow it back to its regular place in the discussion. It has been said in the text that the function of listing by date was sought. However, the nature of Wikipedia debate is that statements not only have a time, but also a given place on the page, so hopefully, even if it was just that you ordered them by date, then ticked a highlight button, and reordered them by placement, and followed the list down to where your highlighted statement was obvious to see, surrounded by a thin yellow border or something... Good luck o/ ~ R. T. G 09:33, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
Is mathematics supposed to be working? At mw:Talk:Sandbox, I found myself unable to reply (clicking reply did nothing) with a <math>...</math> formula: I could create a comment with maths in but the formula doesn't appear in the comment. This looks rather like the situation from last October [13] -- not identical, perhaps, but the executive summary is that mathematics markup under Flow is not fit for purpose. Sigh. Deltahedron ( talk) 19:29, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
So I watched the Breakfast project talk page. That promised to subscribe me to all new topics. However, I did not get a watchlist item for any of the new topics that started overnight, only a ping (though one ping). To get watchlist items I had to individually star the topics. I'm sure that's not how it's supposed to work? Also, generally, people don't want pings because stuff changes – say I watch ANI (god help them when they get flow), I will permanently have a ping from it even if I don't care about discussions there. People want pings when stuff specifically relevant to them happens.
I'm still concerns the devs don't understand the differing purposes of Echo and watchlists. BethNaught ( talk) 07:10, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
Firstly, apologies, haven't looked at the comments, so I may be bringing up a perennial topic or something discussed to death. Sorry if I am.
I had a quick look at WT:BREAKFAST. I'm using monobook skin (force of habit). "Page" doesn't do anything. "Edit" and "View source" are not available - this must be why somebody had to go to ANI to ask somebody to revert vandalism a while back! There must be backwards compatability so that, either out of force of habit for existing editors or if (not when) bugs are found in the UI, the old mechanism is instantly available as a workaround. I'm reminded of this link - getting people to switch to a new system is great, but if they can't switch back, you'll be borrowing trouble. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 12:54, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
Don't know how to call this feature otherwise :-)
In normal talk pages, you can provide links to e.g. Edit a page or to Start a new section, on the same page but also from a different page. Can you do this with Flow? If not, is such functionality planned? Fram ( talk) 13:48, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
The rap on classic talk page is that it's hard for newbies. The simple solution is Model–view–controller -- simply have a "Flow" view and a "classic" view. Whether the conversation is presented as nested colons or facebook style little boxes isn't that important. NE Ent 21:00, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
Looking again at WP:FLOW, I reread the "Rationale" and especially the Expectations. It doesn't really matter for this discussion whether they are good or not, but what is clear that the developers haven taken them too literally, as if these are all the expectations.
What everyone involved seems to have forgotten or ignored is that these are the expected improvements, to be added to the existing good aspects of the functionality. What has been done instead is to remove all functionality and only build the expectations. That's a bit like redesigning the car: the expecttation is that it should be less noisy and less polluting, and instead of an electrical car, you design a bike. Now, a bike is a wonderful invention, and some people need nothing more, but that doesn't mean that we no longer need cars.
Can you please go back to the rationale and rewrite it with an initial list: "key features from the current system that need to be kept". Starting from that, we may perhaps get a Flow system that indeed is useful for what is needed at Wikipedia, instead of one that seems to have forgotten what use cases it was intended for and what system it should be integrated in. Fram ( talk) 09:07, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
I concur. Everything about Flow is backwards. It has zero support for collaboration. It's the antithesis of everything Wiki. Alsee ( talk) 21:03, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
I mentioned this at the test page, but then noticed that you aren't supposed to put feature requests there, so first of several:
Can I opt-in my user talk page to Flow? I think it would be great to make this an option for all users. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 14:45, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
So, I noticed a bug, pretty low priority. Links to topics don't work properly with hovercards. For example, when I mouseover test, it previews the page test (Well, it does it on my watchlist, even if not here), instead of previewing that discussion topic. In other cases, mousing over topic links, such as on the permalink button, gives me the preview for topic. This is obviously a low priority fix, but put it on the list. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 00:57, 12 September 2014 (UTC)
I would suggest that the talk page watchlist star should be located next to the history tab for consistency with every other page on Wikipedia. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 14:46, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
Hi all,
There continue to be arguments about whether a project like Flow is needed at all, so I'd like to provide some background on the decade-long history of thought behind talk pages and how they can be improved.
Fundamentally, there's one key question to answer for talk pages in Wikimedia projects: Do we want discussions to occur in document mode, or in a structured comment mode? All else flows from there (pun intended).
There are not many examples of document mode discussion systems beyond wikis. You sometimes see people use collaborative realtime editors as such, because people want to talk in the same space where they work, but Google Docs provided alternatives (a pretty powerful comments/margin system and built-in chat) early on, for example.
The current talk page system is a document mode system. Individual comments have unclear boundaries (a single transaction can result in multiple comments, signed or unsigned; indentation levels are unpredictable and often inconsistent). All the joys and pain points of working on the same document are present (a heavily trafficked talk page will see many edit conflicts). You can't easily show comments in multiple contexts (cross-wiki, via email, as a notification, etc.) because of the boundary problem.
You could try to make a document mode system work better. On the basis of wikitext, you can do some very basic things, like the "new section" link I added to MediaWiki back in July 2003 [14], when I wrote: "This feature could also be the first stage of a more sophisticated discussion system, where the next stage would be auto-appending signatures and providing a 'Reply to this' link after each comment."
But due to the aforementioned unpredictability, even making a "reply" link work consistently (and do the right thing) is non-trivial. You can get some of the way there, and the Wikipedia Teahouse actually has a gadget, written by Andrew Garrett (more on him below) that does precisely that.
Visit Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions to play with it. Note the "Join this discussion" link. It does give you a pop-up, and posts the comment for you in the right place, with indentation (it does not auto-sign, but instead tries to teach users the signature habit which they'll need to use on other talk pages).
It may be worth doing more research and development on this, to see just how far we can get without changing the fundamentals, since a wholly new system may still be years out for wide use. However, there are inherent limitations due to the lack of a predictable and consistent structure.
You could go further down the road of a document mode or hybrid system, but IMO not without introducing fully predictable comment markers (think <comment id="234234">Bla ~~~</comment>) -- which would pollute the wikitext, be fragile (e.g. accidental or deliberate corruption of identifiers), and probably be considered unacceptable in a system that still supports unlimited wikitext editing for those reasons.
I personally gave up on patchwork on top of talk pages about 10 years ago. The advantages of having comments clearly identified as such are many:
I identified some of these reasons when I wrote the proposal for LiquidThreads in October 2004. At that point, the Wikimedia Foundation had 0 employees, and this was too large an effort to likely get traction from volunteers. So after some time, I managed to persuade third parties to fund development, including Wikicities and WikiEducator, and found a developer to do the initial work, David McCabe. David did a good initial job but the system had many known issues and was only deployed at a small scale.
At the same time, I think there were many things about even the original design that were good (and aren't found in most other forum systems):
As WMF started to grow, it took on development of LiquidThreads -- with one developer, Andrew Garrett, who did an amazing job cleaning up the codebase and rethinking many of the assumptions David had made. LQT got to a point where some Wikimedia wikis actually requested for it to be enabled and traction started to build in favor of it. To this date, it is still found in some nooks and crannies in the Wikimedia universe.
translatewiki.net still uses it for its support page [15], and MediaWiki.org for its support desk [16], which are probably the highest profile uses left, and both get a fair bit of comment traffic.
Andrew did a ton of work on the project, but he himself recognized many architectural issues he wanted to address, and there are also UI assumptions we wanted to revisit. The project didn't have a team behind it at that time -- just one very talented part-time developer who was still at university! This was when WMF was barely growing to do development work, picking up some stuff (like LQT and FlaggedRevs) that had been simmering at a smaller scale before then.
In 2011, Brandon Harris, the first person at WMF ever to be tasked exclusively with design responsibilities, took a crack at some initial redesign drafts [17] [18], which still contain many ideas worth looking at. But we pulled the plug at that time, because we recognized that we simply didn't have the personpower to put the resources behind the project to actually get it anywhere near completion -- and that a major architectural overhaul was required to do so.
A new effort was launched about a year ago, now resourcing a full team including design, development, product management, community support. (We're still pretty short staffed on UX research, QA, and data analyst support, but we make do.) As the team (including Andrew with his LQT experience under his belt) thought through the architectural needs of a modern discussion system, they decided that the LQT architecture was not salvageable. A migration script [19] is in development by Andrew himself.
The Flow architecture [20] differs in some important ways from LQT, including:
I don't think the architecture is perfect, but it should be a reasonable foundation to build on and iterate from.
The Flow UI, similarly, represents a first pass at this point. A lot of basic functionality is still missing. Things we know will make users happy (like cross-wiki features) are still ways out. It doesn't support VisualEditor yet, and yet its wikitext input suffers from any issues Parsoid does -- decisions made to future-proof the architecture have negative short term impact.
And like any brand-new UI, it could use lots of micro-optimization -- glitches here and there, which you may not even consciously notice, but which give you the feeling that you're using not-quite-ready software. Which you are.
At the same time, we know from user studies that talk pages are incredibly hard for new users to figure out. The semantics are just extremely different from anything else on the web. So we think a support forum like the Teahouse, and its equivalent in other languages may be a good place to start -- provided the hosts agree that there are no dealbreaker issues for them. This parallels the long adoption of LQT for support desk type forums.
In this context, we also want to do some systematic measurement: How does such a system affect the # of comments posted, and the quality of the discussion?
We expect that we'd need to focus in on this use case in production for quite some time to get it right and really get people to fall in love with the system as it improves. At the same time, there may be other use cases that are less contentious and could serve as additional trials -- like talk pages in Wikidata.
We're not pushing an aggressive schedule on Flow -- we understand it needs to happen at the pace of the communities, since you can't build an "opt-out" for this kind of system (unlike VisualEditor). So the schedule is going to have to give as needed.
And as above, I'm open to us putting some short term effort into talk page improvements that can be made without Flow -- knowing it's still some time out. But based on the above long term functional and architectural considerations, I think a system that treats comments/threads as structured information, rather than as documents, is ultimately necessary, so I'd argue against procrastinating. It's going to be hard enough as it is to get this done without putting it on the backburner once more.
Finally, any comment that is about specific Flow UI aspects should be treated with a massive block of salt. The UI will evolve dramatically as we learn what works for new and experienced users alike.
Sincerely,
Erik Moeller (WMF) (
talk) 05:03, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
@ Erik Moeller (WMF): Erik, I have already talked in several occasions about those different models at this talk page. Of the two models you present, I personally prefer the first one for Wikipedia, the document-centric approach- although I agree a hybrid approach should be explored (the Teahouse has shown that it can be made newbie-friendly, and I think the expert community could handle a marker-based approach the same way it can manage templates now). It's a real shame though that this conversation didn't take place before all development on FLOW started.
It has been clear for some time from your comments that you favored that change of model as your vision for the new system. The essential problem with your approach to this project is that you never acknowledged the possibility that we could prefer the document-based model, but several editors (myself included) have stated just that, without using this terminology. The list of benefits you posted I see as "nice to have", maybe, but none of them I see as essential. On the other hand, changing away from the document model would lose many possibilities and quirks that thousands of power users depend upon for their daily workflows.
Now, don't get me wrong, those benefits may be a great way to build new communities around them, they're just not a good fit for this already existing, mature community. Wiki software has a long tradition of good practices on how to handle conversations, and the communities that depend upon them have come to rely and benefit from those. Full accountability, flexibility and deep equality of all participants on the final result are expected properties of the system, which the "structured comments" model doesn't have. We have already seen how the new system fall short on them, with people not being able to change other people's comments or see the list of all changes to a board; by the time you rebuild all these essential features in the new system, you'd be mostly back to an ad-hoc, incomplete, bug-ridden, slow document-based model again.
This is not an "old" way to do things, merely different from the mainstream; but this way is what makes the community tick and acknowledge ourselves as such, and what allowed us to build a project that is different from what any other company like Google or About.com tried but couldn't accomplish; and now you're requesting us to throw away all that and turn us into something different; perhaps offering to re-build from scratch a few of the lost features that a small percentage of the user base rely upon, but never recovering the full possibilities of the previous model. Maybe a huge company like Google could accomplish such feat, at the cost of a huge impact to their reputation; but there's no way a "small company, pretty short staffed on UX research, QA, and data analyst support" could manage to execute such change to the essence of a large, working community. The way I see it, you're running a locomotive full-steam against a solid mountain, and a crash ten times huger than the VE and Media Viewer combined is on the horizon.
What hurts more is that you have single-handedly decided that the existing participation model must conform to the new paradigm. Instead of building your own new project where to test those assumptions, you will hijack the tools on which the existing community was born and evolved, and such fundamental change to the essence and nature of participation in the project has been presented as fait accompli, something that will happen whether we want it or not.
If it's true that community input is welcome, acknowledge the possibility that "Structured conversation" is not what we want or need, and plan accordingly. Drop this narrative that Flow *must* replace current talk pages in the end, which is seen as a menace to the core of the community. If you make a strong stance to limit Flow to side projects, you may find the welcoming, collaborative atmosphere you wish for. The end result may very well be that the community finally accepts the change to the new model for all conversation; or it may be that we reject it altogether. But that acceptance only can happen organically, with people here and there realizing and accepting that it's indeed a better model. So please, chase the core narrative and let the goals of the process be community-driven, as a sign of respect to the community that you want to serve. Diego ( talk) 09:39, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
Please don't fix talk pages, they are not broken. Chillum 15:44, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
I hope that the patch to solve the notifications problem is intended as very temporary? It isn't really a solution.
I was testing (it's a test page!), adding a standard talk page header to the header of the test page. The first random page I encountered was Talk:Nuk-luk, with a rather standard talk page header (not the smallest one, but nithing exceptional or outrageous). I can't add it, message "The content is too large. Content after expansion is limited to 25600 bytes." Right... Second one, with only one project, worked, third one was Talk:Chesma (ship), failed. Fourth, Talk:Pyaar Kiya Nahin Jaatha, belongs to two projects, failed.
But we are on a Wikipedia talk page, perhaps I need to focus on Wikipedia talk headers? First one, Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Accessibility: I omitted the miszabot and archive templates (although we need the latter), but still no success. Wikipedia talk:Copyright problems.
It only works with simple things like Talkheader (note how this and other templates interpret the header as a redirect though, not good either).
I understand that some typical talk page templates will need to be reworked to work on Flow. But it still needs to be possible to put them in a header of course, and currently we can't. Fram ( talk) 12:11, 12 September 2014 (UTC)
This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 5 | ← | Archive 9 | Archive 10 | Archive 11 | Archive 12 | Archive 13 | → | Archive 15 |
If this goes life, I will not use it. As not using your talk page is not compatible with being an admin, I'll have to give up the tools, which I will do, of course. I might even stop editing altogether. -- Randykitty ( talk) 10:15, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
So, he at least is happy for you to leave: in fact, quite prepared to dissolve the people and elect another. Deltahedron ( talk) 16:44, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
The View History page for Wikipedia:Co-op/Mentorship_match doesn't have all the usual "stuff" (e.g. Revision history search, et. al.) -- is that a test artifact? NE Ent 23:33, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
I posted on the teahouse board as a test, and yesterday SmokeyJoe replied to it. Today, I received the signpost in my talk, so it created two notifications and the little red button said 2. However, on clicking, the popup window was overidden by the Flow notifications, so I was unable to see my second notification that did not have to do anything with Flow. Only by going to the full page Special:Notifications was I able to see my message. KonveyorBelt 15:18, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
The notifications system continues to alert me on my notifications about a post that was posted six months ago with my user name linked. This appears to be Flow-related, so posting here. See: Topic on Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Breakfast. NorthAmerica 1000 04:50, 7 September 2014 (UTC)
Am I the only one to get a strange "No formatting defined for notification." red line in the middle of my "messages"? Fram ( talk) 09:22, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
It wont let me hide or delete vandalism posted on flow enabled talk pages. When I click hid, it pops up the hide window, but wont accept input, or let me click the hide button. Same for delete. Running MonoBook on Firefox. Monty 845 17:49, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Flow test. Really?
You claim on WP:FLOW, about deployments to anywhere else, that "All deployment ideas are preliminary; actual rollout depends on conversations with staff and community stakeholders. These can be unlocked when we meet our goals for the quarter." And then you don't contact any "community stakeholders" (who would that be? You simply mean the editing community, I presume, but prefer management terms apparently), but just start with another Flow page, despite people clearly expressing serious doubts about Flow at the Teahouse (here, and at the discussion I started at the Teahouse since you apparently forgot that).
It seems that you will fit in nicely with the majority of the WMF people we encounter here (with my apologies to the few that do deserve our repect for trying to really engage the editors here in an open and constructive way). And that Flow will fit in nicely with the majority of WMF deployments as well.
We can't delete the page you started, we can't disable Flow from it, we can't move it away from the Teahouse to your user space (three times very convenient for you), so I have fully protected it. If you want to roll out Flow any further, first discuss it, get some semblance of consensus, and then act upon it. And, of course, if you want that consensus, that agreement, then first seriously improve Flow. You have three pages here were you can test it, you have the whole of Mediawiki, you can enable Flow on the WMF homesite as much as you like. But don't use enwiki as your private testing ground, I thought the WMF had at least learned that much by now, but clearly I was wrong. Fram ( talk) 07:49, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
I have given Wikipedia:Co-op/Mentorship match the same treatment, even though that page has one enwiki editor supporting it. Flow should not be rolled out any further without some serious discussion, not this "let's hope no one will notice it" approach. Fram ( talk) 10:14, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
@ Quiddity (WMF): (and other WMF people involved in this debacle): You claimed above, quite emphatically, in a response to all this: "Note: Those 2 test pages were specifically asked for, by editors who want to brainstorm and test potential gadgets and scripts to work with Flow." Could you please, just as emphatically, state that this was a mistake on your part, that no such thing was asked for at the Teahouse, and that most editors there were quite clearly against enabling Flow at the moment? And could you then perhaps as well delete that page, as an unwanted implementation of new, buggy software against the wishes of most involved editors? Fram ( talk) 08:39, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
At mw:Wikimedia Engineering/2014-15 Goals we read that for WMFQ1, what the rest of us call July-September 2014, number 3 on the list of "Top departmental priorities" we can expect 3) Deploy Flow to significant Wikipedia use case (in consideration: Teahouse or similar workflow) with the caveat Teahouse is a major use case, there are a fair number of must-have features still outstanding to support it well, and we may not be able to get all the way there in Q1. I realise that these Goals are subject to change like everything in the sublunary world, but it looks as if this was particularly visionary. It also looks as if the required community consensus is likely to be absent for a long time to come. Presumably a major rewrite of those goals is to be expected? I hope that in the light of the controversy above, a very serious attempt will be made to rebuld the consensus before writing another goal of this nature, namely one that imposes Flow on a significant working part of the Englis Wikipedia? Deltahedron ( talk) 20:36, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
So, User:DannyH (WMF), when are you going to
You're the product manager, you are responsible for the implementation of these changes, you are responsible for the eventual acceptance of Flow by the community (if ever), and you are responsible for the mess of the last week. Just keeping quiet (or only responding to the easy questions and ignoring the more embarassing or hard ones) may seem preferable to you now, but (at least for me) the result is that I'll never trust you on anything Flow-related in the future. My impression from most comments is that there is already an extreme reluctance by many editors and admins (or "community stakeholders" in the WMF newspeak) to ever consider Flow as a possible replacement. You won't be able to give grants to every page in return for using Flow, so you'll have to find another solution. Communication and honesty may help. Having good, thoroughly tested software is also beneficial of course. Fram ( talk) 07:16, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
I have a red 1 next to my user name atop the page. When I click on it, I see I've been mentioned on a Flow page, but the red 1 remains. If I click on the message, I'm taken to the page "[f830b7d3] 2014-09-08 13:14:23: Fatal exception of type MWException" (side point: why are the exceptions so non-specifically named?) and the red 1 remains. There seems to be no way of removing the red 1, no matter what I try doing. -- Ypnypn ( talk) 13:15, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
I think keeping track of new posts on watched pages is genuinely a job for the watchlist, not for Echo. And the watchlist should easily be able to handle it, if Flow is properly integrated with it. After all, normal talk pages also generate watchlist entries for each added/edited post. Of course "properly integrated" includes respecting user preferences like grouping and showing all vs. the latest changes.
One could discuss having an Echo notification type for new watchlist entries, but then for all of them, not just those coming from Flow. And if introduced, this type of notification should definitely not be enabled by default for existing users (it might be useful for new users to make them aware of their watchlist though). The only argument I read (unfortunately not here, forgot where) for direct notifications about Flow activity was that new users don't know how to use their watchlist. That is indeed a problem, but I think direct Flow notifications are far from being a reasonable solution:
TLDR: Please integrate Flow with the watchlist (RC, history, contribs etc.) in the same way as normal pages/talkpages. Please don't use Echo as a Flow-watchlist. Please allow for a discussion of major changes in the respective roles of watchlists and notifications before implementing them. — HHHIPPO 19:18, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
Maybe you need to be reminded again: Flow is not ready for deployment. It lacks basic functions and its look and feel is completely different from the rest of Wikipedia. Newbies need to learn about Wikipedia as it is, not as you hope it will be some times in the future. So please don't bother them with Flow or any other pre-alpha software. This request applies to the Teahouse as well as the co-op and any other page where newbies are expected in relevant numbers. -- h-stt !? 16:42, 5 September 2014 (UTC)
I can see that it is time-consuming and somewhat inefficient for WMF staff to keep revisiting design decisions that have already been made a year ago, with users who were, for whatever reason, not involved in those discussions, raising questions and issues that will all have been considered and resolved during the planning process. As I think I suggested above, perhaps the relevant design documents, with the decisions and the reasoning behind them, which will have been generated during the design and planning process, could be posted, or pointed to? That way users can simply read off the answers to their questions without wating too much staff time. Deltahedron ( talk) 18:06, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
Danny, one thing that would help is if WP:FLOW could be written more clearly, with a detailed summary in the lead, highlighting the issues that Wikipedians are going to care about. For example, it is true that the Foundation is effectively proposing to abolish talk pages? What is going to happen to current and future archives? Is it true that Flow will have infinite scrolling (as with Twitter)? I keep seeing these issues raised on this page, but can't work out whether people simply fear these things are the case, or whether they really are. Some very plain speaking would help a lot. SlimVirgin (talk) 23:48, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
I was surprised to discover that mw:Flow/User_stories is currently a blank page. If there are no user stories, perhaps the discussions here are now moot? Or are they going to be rebooted too? Deltahedron ( talk) 17:08, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
@ Erik Moeller (WMF):: in a post here, you claim (about the difference between the transclusion we normally get vs. the substitution Flow automatically does) that
"Contrary to some descriptions, it's not quite the same as {{subst:}}ing the template. You can still get back to the wikitext used produce the output, and change it, and potentially re-parse it. It just doesn't do so automatically (which is also not an inherent limitation). "
If I substitute something, I get the wikitext it produced, I can change it, and reparse it. Or I can change the source (template, whatever) and re-substitute it. How exactly is what Flow does "not quite the same"? If it is exactly the same, then why did you claim otherwise? In any case, why not leave the choice to editors whether they want to transclude or substitute it? Fram ( talk) 07:31, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
We (enWiki) have some bots which edit talk pages (and not just archiving bots and signature bots). For this functionality to continue, "what links here" must work, and those bots must be able to edit Flow messages. This also damages the stability of template expansion mentioned above. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 04:44, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
Erik states above that "because you can't easily switch back and forth once you convert a page, we need to move very carefully." In the archives of talk:Wikiproject breakfast I see that we were told "What will happen to this pages contents when the trial ends? We can't turn wikitext into Flow posts, but we can turn Flow posts back to wikitext – so your discussions will be preserved and returned to you". These two statements don't seem consistent. Can someone please clarify this? Dougweller ( talk) 14:37, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
at Wikipedia talk:WikiProject Breakfast about black genitalia? The file seems to have been deleted but it the topic is still here. @ Quiddity (WMF): you've supposedly hidden a topic there, but the topic heading is still there. I've suggested we go back to a normal talk page. Dougweller ( talk) 13:30, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
I still have two 10 day old messages and one 6 month old one alerting me to changes on the Talk:Flow/Developer test page. That's all I see unless I click on "All notifications". And why does the red box say 1? Dougweller ( talk) 16:37, 9 September 2014 (UTC)
I think the rollout of Flow might be more successful if it was just a rollout of Flow. Currently, the rollout includes many changes unrelated to Flow. For example: gray text, limited editing of others' comments, lots of whitespace, etc. These changes may be right or wrong, but they have nothing to do with Flow (why is gray text only needed for discussions, not articles?). Combining all of them into Flow is causing more conflict than necessary. I suggest that the rollout of Flow be focused on just Flow, and leave other changes to a separate project. -- Ypnypn ( talk) 16:46, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
So, Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Flow test has been deleted, thanks. It seems that User:Xaosflux had the honours. A few questions
Please remind me who thought that this was even remotely ready to be deployed to a live environment? This is a troll- and vandal-magnet the way it is now.
Can you please finally agree to postpone all further implementations (outside mediawiki or testwiki or labs) until you get the basic functionalities to work? Fram ( talk) 06:40, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
- Rename [[Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/Flow_test]] to [[Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions/ExperimentalFlowRoom]]
- Reply • 2 comments • 20:49, 9 September 2014
- Ad Huikeshoven
- The main objection to this page as I understand is the word "test" in the name. The intention is to experiment in the Teahouse with using Flow as the interaction tool. Another name might be a better fit for that use.
- Fram
- Ad Huikeshoven: Since you clearly don't understand the issues at hand, perhaps it is better if you just drop this?
@ DannyH (WMF): you usually ignore my questions, but perhaps you can check at least this issue and indicate whether this works as expected? I'll not bother you about the issue that many edits made in Flow (to live pages and topics, nothing hidden or deleted) do not show up in ones contributions, I understand from other reactions that WMF people seem to think that this is a feature, not a bug anyway; but when we finally can test one page for deletion (indirectly, but it's a start), some seven months after this rather basic functionality was requested, it turns out that almost everything that could be wrong with it, is indeed wrong with it.
So I'ld like to know: why has a system that can not be properly tracked, removed, maintained, ... been rolled out to a live environment, with the clear intention (and attempts) to expand and speed up this rollout, and with promises that everything was reversible when obviously this has never been tested (or at least not successfully)? When you ask us to test things, shouldn't you be A) reasonably certain that it works for most cases and B) willing and able to reverse everything if it turns out to go wrong anyway? The past two weeks have been one deluge of major problems. Fram ( talk) 17:29, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
Preliminary: when was the Topic namespace announced here (at enwiki I mean), and when was it implemented? Seems to have been done very hush-hush, but I may simply have missed it. Is a rather serious design decision, to replace all talk namespaces eventually with only one namespace, and something that just perhaps warrants some discussion?
Current problem: there are quite a few recent changes to the Topic namespace ( [4]). But these can not be found in the user contributions when searching for the Topic namespace (e.g. [5] or [6] or [7] don't give any Topic namespace contributions (which they clearly have).
Could the devs perhaps not roll out a complete new namespace before it has been tested somewhat to see that the most basic functionalities actually work? Fram ( talk) 08:46, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
And before people think "oh, contributions simply don't go to the topics namespace yet", some apparently do, as we have this. One of them is even not the current one. Mind you, I can't see easily if this is correct, as (just like I noted below) the history returns an error...
Strange (worrying for those of you that still worry about Flow) is that the dates indicated at that page don't match the dates indicated at the actual Flow topics. This seems to be not only totally unusable, but also totally unreliable and corrupt. Rather unlike the WMF, where I have no indications of any corruptness. Fram ( talk) 17:06, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
Had a Flow page entry in my contributions, clicked on "hist" and got a completely white page with the text
"[958a135f] 2014-09-08 16:37:25: Fatal exception of type MWException" [12]
If I go to Wikipedia talk:Flow/Developer test page and try the same (click on History), I get the same error. Perhaps an indication that they have started removing Flow from enwiki? (Hey, one can always hope :-D ) Fram ( talk) 16:40, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
I have no idea where this came from, but when trying to exit pages with Flow on this project, I am now getting the standard microsoft "are you sure you want to leave this page?" pop-up, and I have to decide whether to leave or stay on the page before moving on. This has happened with both Firefox and IE9 in the last few days. Could we please not have that? It's one thing for a warning message when one is mid-edit and about to leave a page, but simply viewing a page shouldn't have this result. Risker ( talk) 16:53, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
As of now, I made the last edit to the page. It is in the table of expected functionality. I wrote that when Flow is perfect, the user will be able to bring the latest post to the top of the list, and then follow it back to its regular place in the discussion. It has been said in the text that the function of listing by date was sought. However, the nature of Wikipedia debate is that statements not only have a time, but also a given place on the page, so hopefully, even if it was just that you ordered them by date, then ticked a highlight button, and reordered them by placement, and followed the list down to where your highlighted statement was obvious to see, surrounded by a thin yellow border or something... Good luck o/ ~ R. T. G 09:33, 8 September 2014 (UTC)
Is mathematics supposed to be working? At mw:Talk:Sandbox, I found myself unable to reply (clicking reply did nothing) with a <math>...</math> formula: I could create a comment with maths in but the formula doesn't appear in the comment. This looks rather like the situation from last October [13] -- not identical, perhaps, but the executive summary is that mathematics markup under Flow is not fit for purpose. Sigh. Deltahedron ( talk) 19:29, 29 August 2014 (UTC)
So I watched the Breakfast project talk page. That promised to subscribe me to all new topics. However, I did not get a watchlist item for any of the new topics that started overnight, only a ping (though one ping). To get watchlist items I had to individually star the topics. I'm sure that's not how it's supposed to work? Also, generally, people don't want pings because stuff changes – say I watch ANI (god help them when they get flow), I will permanently have a ping from it even if I don't care about discussions there. People want pings when stuff specifically relevant to them happens.
I'm still concerns the devs don't understand the differing purposes of Echo and watchlists. BethNaught ( talk) 07:10, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
Firstly, apologies, haven't looked at the comments, so I may be bringing up a perennial topic or something discussed to death. Sorry if I am.
I had a quick look at WT:BREAKFAST. I'm using monobook skin (force of habit). "Page" doesn't do anything. "Edit" and "View source" are not available - this must be why somebody had to go to ANI to ask somebody to revert vandalism a while back! There must be backwards compatability so that, either out of force of habit for existing editors or if (not when) bugs are found in the UI, the old mechanism is instantly available as a workaround. I'm reminded of this link - getting people to switch to a new system is great, but if they can't switch back, you'll be borrowing trouble. Ritchie333 (talk) (cont) 12:54, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
Don't know how to call this feature otherwise :-)
In normal talk pages, you can provide links to e.g. Edit a page or to Start a new section, on the same page but also from a different page. Can you do this with Flow? If not, is such functionality planned? Fram ( talk) 13:48, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
The rap on classic talk page is that it's hard for newbies. The simple solution is Model–view–controller -- simply have a "Flow" view and a "classic" view. Whether the conversation is presented as nested colons or facebook style little boxes isn't that important. NE Ent 21:00, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
Looking again at WP:FLOW, I reread the "Rationale" and especially the Expectations. It doesn't really matter for this discussion whether they are good or not, but what is clear that the developers haven taken them too literally, as if these are all the expectations.
What everyone involved seems to have forgotten or ignored is that these are the expected improvements, to be added to the existing good aspects of the functionality. What has been done instead is to remove all functionality and only build the expectations. That's a bit like redesigning the car: the expecttation is that it should be less noisy and less polluting, and instead of an electrical car, you design a bike. Now, a bike is a wonderful invention, and some people need nothing more, but that doesn't mean that we no longer need cars.
Can you please go back to the rationale and rewrite it with an initial list: "key features from the current system that need to be kept". Starting from that, we may perhaps get a Flow system that indeed is useful for what is needed at Wikipedia, instead of one that seems to have forgotten what use cases it was intended for and what system it should be integrated in. Fram ( talk) 09:07, 10 September 2014 (UTC)
I concur. Everything about Flow is backwards. It has zero support for collaboration. It's the antithesis of everything Wiki. Alsee ( talk) 21:03, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
I mentioned this at the test page, but then noticed that you aren't supposed to put feature requests there, so first of several:
Can I opt-in my user talk page to Flow? I think it would be great to make this an option for all users. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 14:45, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
So, I noticed a bug, pretty low priority. Links to topics don't work properly with hovercards. For example, when I mouseover test, it previews the page test (Well, it does it on my watchlist, even if not here), instead of previewing that discussion topic. In other cases, mousing over topic links, such as on the permalink button, gives me the preview for topic. This is obviously a low priority fix, but put it on the list. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 00:57, 12 September 2014 (UTC)
I would suggest that the talk page watchlist star should be located next to the history tab for consistency with every other page on Wikipedia. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 14:46, 11 September 2014 (UTC)
Hi all,
There continue to be arguments about whether a project like Flow is needed at all, so I'd like to provide some background on the decade-long history of thought behind talk pages and how they can be improved.
Fundamentally, there's one key question to answer for talk pages in Wikimedia projects: Do we want discussions to occur in document mode, or in a structured comment mode? All else flows from there (pun intended).
There are not many examples of document mode discussion systems beyond wikis. You sometimes see people use collaborative realtime editors as such, because people want to talk in the same space where they work, but Google Docs provided alternatives (a pretty powerful comments/margin system and built-in chat) early on, for example.
The current talk page system is a document mode system. Individual comments have unclear boundaries (a single transaction can result in multiple comments, signed or unsigned; indentation levels are unpredictable and often inconsistent). All the joys and pain points of working on the same document are present (a heavily trafficked talk page will see many edit conflicts). You can't easily show comments in multiple contexts (cross-wiki, via email, as a notification, etc.) because of the boundary problem.
You could try to make a document mode system work better. On the basis of wikitext, you can do some very basic things, like the "new section" link I added to MediaWiki back in July 2003 [14], when I wrote: "This feature could also be the first stage of a more sophisticated discussion system, where the next stage would be auto-appending signatures and providing a 'Reply to this' link after each comment."
But due to the aforementioned unpredictability, even making a "reply" link work consistently (and do the right thing) is non-trivial. You can get some of the way there, and the Wikipedia Teahouse actually has a gadget, written by Andrew Garrett (more on him below) that does precisely that.
Visit Wikipedia:Teahouse/Questions to play with it. Note the "Join this discussion" link. It does give you a pop-up, and posts the comment for you in the right place, with indentation (it does not auto-sign, but instead tries to teach users the signature habit which they'll need to use on other talk pages).
It may be worth doing more research and development on this, to see just how far we can get without changing the fundamentals, since a wholly new system may still be years out for wide use. However, there are inherent limitations due to the lack of a predictable and consistent structure.
You could go further down the road of a document mode or hybrid system, but IMO not without introducing fully predictable comment markers (think <comment id="234234">Bla ~~~</comment>) -- which would pollute the wikitext, be fragile (e.g. accidental or deliberate corruption of identifiers), and probably be considered unacceptable in a system that still supports unlimited wikitext editing for those reasons.
I personally gave up on patchwork on top of talk pages about 10 years ago. The advantages of having comments clearly identified as such are many:
I identified some of these reasons when I wrote the proposal for LiquidThreads in October 2004. At that point, the Wikimedia Foundation had 0 employees, and this was too large an effort to likely get traction from volunteers. So after some time, I managed to persuade third parties to fund development, including Wikicities and WikiEducator, and found a developer to do the initial work, David McCabe. David did a good initial job but the system had many known issues and was only deployed at a small scale.
At the same time, I think there were many things about even the original design that were good (and aren't found in most other forum systems):
As WMF started to grow, it took on development of LiquidThreads -- with one developer, Andrew Garrett, who did an amazing job cleaning up the codebase and rethinking many of the assumptions David had made. LQT got to a point where some Wikimedia wikis actually requested for it to be enabled and traction started to build in favor of it. To this date, it is still found in some nooks and crannies in the Wikimedia universe.
translatewiki.net still uses it for its support page [15], and MediaWiki.org for its support desk [16], which are probably the highest profile uses left, and both get a fair bit of comment traffic.
Andrew did a ton of work on the project, but he himself recognized many architectural issues he wanted to address, and there are also UI assumptions we wanted to revisit. The project didn't have a team behind it at that time -- just one very talented part-time developer who was still at university! This was when WMF was barely growing to do development work, picking up some stuff (like LQT and FlaggedRevs) that had been simmering at a smaller scale before then.
In 2011, Brandon Harris, the first person at WMF ever to be tasked exclusively with design responsibilities, took a crack at some initial redesign drafts [17] [18], which still contain many ideas worth looking at. But we pulled the plug at that time, because we recognized that we simply didn't have the personpower to put the resources behind the project to actually get it anywhere near completion -- and that a major architectural overhaul was required to do so.
A new effort was launched about a year ago, now resourcing a full team including design, development, product management, community support. (We're still pretty short staffed on UX research, QA, and data analyst support, but we make do.) As the team (including Andrew with his LQT experience under his belt) thought through the architectural needs of a modern discussion system, they decided that the LQT architecture was not salvageable. A migration script [19] is in development by Andrew himself.
The Flow architecture [20] differs in some important ways from LQT, including:
I don't think the architecture is perfect, but it should be a reasonable foundation to build on and iterate from.
The Flow UI, similarly, represents a first pass at this point. A lot of basic functionality is still missing. Things we know will make users happy (like cross-wiki features) are still ways out. It doesn't support VisualEditor yet, and yet its wikitext input suffers from any issues Parsoid does -- decisions made to future-proof the architecture have negative short term impact.
And like any brand-new UI, it could use lots of micro-optimization -- glitches here and there, which you may not even consciously notice, but which give you the feeling that you're using not-quite-ready software. Which you are.
At the same time, we know from user studies that talk pages are incredibly hard for new users to figure out. The semantics are just extremely different from anything else on the web. So we think a support forum like the Teahouse, and its equivalent in other languages may be a good place to start -- provided the hosts agree that there are no dealbreaker issues for them. This parallels the long adoption of LQT for support desk type forums.
In this context, we also want to do some systematic measurement: How does such a system affect the # of comments posted, and the quality of the discussion?
We expect that we'd need to focus in on this use case in production for quite some time to get it right and really get people to fall in love with the system as it improves. At the same time, there may be other use cases that are less contentious and could serve as additional trials -- like talk pages in Wikidata.
We're not pushing an aggressive schedule on Flow -- we understand it needs to happen at the pace of the communities, since you can't build an "opt-out" for this kind of system (unlike VisualEditor). So the schedule is going to have to give as needed.
And as above, I'm open to us putting some short term effort into talk page improvements that can be made without Flow -- knowing it's still some time out. But based on the above long term functional and architectural considerations, I think a system that treats comments/threads as structured information, rather than as documents, is ultimately necessary, so I'd argue against procrastinating. It's going to be hard enough as it is to get this done without putting it on the backburner once more.
Finally, any comment that is about specific Flow UI aspects should be treated with a massive block of salt. The UI will evolve dramatically as we learn what works for new and experienced users alike.
Sincerely,
Erik Moeller (WMF) (
talk) 05:03, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
@ Erik Moeller (WMF): Erik, I have already talked in several occasions about those different models at this talk page. Of the two models you present, I personally prefer the first one for Wikipedia, the document-centric approach- although I agree a hybrid approach should be explored (the Teahouse has shown that it can be made newbie-friendly, and I think the expert community could handle a marker-based approach the same way it can manage templates now). It's a real shame though that this conversation didn't take place before all development on FLOW started.
It has been clear for some time from your comments that you favored that change of model as your vision for the new system. The essential problem with your approach to this project is that you never acknowledged the possibility that we could prefer the document-based model, but several editors (myself included) have stated just that, without using this terminology. The list of benefits you posted I see as "nice to have", maybe, but none of them I see as essential. On the other hand, changing away from the document model would lose many possibilities and quirks that thousands of power users depend upon for their daily workflows.
Now, don't get me wrong, those benefits may be a great way to build new communities around them, they're just not a good fit for this already existing, mature community. Wiki software has a long tradition of good practices on how to handle conversations, and the communities that depend upon them have come to rely and benefit from those. Full accountability, flexibility and deep equality of all participants on the final result are expected properties of the system, which the "structured comments" model doesn't have. We have already seen how the new system fall short on them, with people not being able to change other people's comments or see the list of all changes to a board; by the time you rebuild all these essential features in the new system, you'd be mostly back to an ad-hoc, incomplete, bug-ridden, slow document-based model again.
This is not an "old" way to do things, merely different from the mainstream; but this way is what makes the community tick and acknowledge ourselves as such, and what allowed us to build a project that is different from what any other company like Google or About.com tried but couldn't accomplish; and now you're requesting us to throw away all that and turn us into something different; perhaps offering to re-build from scratch a few of the lost features that a small percentage of the user base rely upon, but never recovering the full possibilities of the previous model. Maybe a huge company like Google could accomplish such feat, at the cost of a huge impact to their reputation; but there's no way a "small company, pretty short staffed on UX research, QA, and data analyst support" could manage to execute such change to the essence of a large, working community. The way I see it, you're running a locomotive full-steam against a solid mountain, and a crash ten times huger than the VE and Media Viewer combined is on the horizon.
What hurts more is that you have single-handedly decided that the existing participation model must conform to the new paradigm. Instead of building your own new project where to test those assumptions, you will hijack the tools on which the existing community was born and evolved, and such fundamental change to the essence and nature of participation in the project has been presented as fait accompli, something that will happen whether we want it or not.
If it's true that community input is welcome, acknowledge the possibility that "Structured conversation" is not what we want or need, and plan accordingly. Drop this narrative that Flow *must* replace current talk pages in the end, which is seen as a menace to the core of the community. If you make a strong stance to limit Flow to side projects, you may find the welcoming, collaborative atmosphere you wish for. The end result may very well be that the community finally accepts the change to the new model for all conversation; or it may be that we reject it altogether. But that acceptance only can happen organically, with people here and there realizing and accepting that it's indeed a better model. So please, chase the core narrative and let the goals of the process be community-driven, as a sign of respect to the community that you want to serve. Diego ( talk) 09:39, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
Please don't fix talk pages, they are not broken. Chillum 15:44, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
I hope that the patch to solve the notifications problem is intended as very temporary? It isn't really a solution.
I was testing (it's a test page!), adding a standard talk page header to the header of the test page. The first random page I encountered was Talk:Nuk-luk, with a rather standard talk page header (not the smallest one, but nithing exceptional or outrageous). I can't add it, message "The content is too large. Content after expansion is limited to 25600 bytes." Right... Second one, with only one project, worked, third one was Talk:Chesma (ship), failed. Fourth, Talk:Pyaar Kiya Nahin Jaatha, belongs to two projects, failed.
But we are on a Wikipedia talk page, perhaps I need to focus on Wikipedia talk headers? First one, Wikipedia talk:Manual of Style/Accessibility: I omitted the miszabot and archive templates (although we need the latter), but still no success. Wikipedia talk:Copyright problems.
It only works with simple things like Talkheader (note how this and other templates interpret the header as a redirect though, not good either).
I understand that some typical talk page templates will need to be reworked to work on Flow. But it still needs to be possible to put them in a header of course, and currently we can't. Fram ( talk) 12:11, 12 September 2014 (UTC)