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User talk:Levivich/Flow
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The dev team never got far enough to decide what the proper indentation level was, or anything like that. BTW, trying typing the @ symbol. If you're in visual mode, it'll offer to look up the name of anyone you'd like to have join this conversation.
@WhatamIdoing Yeah, the mention function is just one of many industry-standard features missing at enwiki... I know you said don't get your hopes up but I have to ask... you said five years. Was that an exaggeration? Why so long? Strikes me as needing months but not years of further development.
There's a lot that needs to be done to make it do what we (you and volunteer-me) really want. The codebase is old enough that most of it would have to be re-written because of w:en:software rot. Some original choices are doubtful (e.g., the database is recording our the comments in HTML+RDFa rather than wikitext) and would probably be reversed. That's probably a year's work (maybe more) by itself, and we haven't actually improved anything from the POV of the user yet.
There are several bugs about proper integration into MediaWiki (e.g., to make it possible to oversight a single comment rather than whole threads). If you want it to work for high-volume editors, then watchlist integration needs to change. The way this appears in Echo wasn't meant to be the main system, and just imagine what the notifications would look like if you have thousands of pages on your watchlist. (And lots of us do: https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/how-many-pages-are-on-your-watchlist-right-now/3129 ) I start every morning at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine&action=history so I can see what happened since yesterday. I can quickly scan the diff of every change since my last visit. That's not possible in Flow. It's supposed to be, but the PM de-prioritized that. (He's since apologized very nicely for that decision.)
So stuff like that would take another year or two, and then we might be able to get into the actually interesting parts. Imagine that Commons' deletion discussions happen "at" Commons and at whichever wikis are using the file. Imagine that when editors want to have a vote (e.g., at RFA and ArbCom), they could actually just have a vote. We'd end up with something awesome, but that's another couple of years' work, plus time to teach the tech volunteers how to set the thing up to do the things they want at each wiki.
If you're interested in reading more, then I'll recommend reading Talk pages consultation 2019/Discussion tools in the past and w:en:User talk:Jorm#Hey. In the meantime, work-me has some good news: the Editing team is looking at making the @ thing work in their new Talk pages project/replying tool, which you can test at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_utilisatrice:Whatamidoing_(WMF)?dtenable=1
@WhatamIdoing Interesting. Thanks again for the links–I'll read through them (and then probably pester you with more questions).
You can watchlist a section??
Why the hell don't we have this on enwiki? WhatamIdoing can you kindly point me to the relevant discussion?
There were a lot of discussions, but this one was one of the last at enwiki. (One of the editors involved then went to a few more communities to ask them to demand the same treatment.)
Some of the reasons were basically valid: it's a big change in workflow, and why should I have to spend my precious time learning a new system? Some were pure misinformation. (There was a guy who insisted for months and months that it would be impossible to discussion math equations in Flow, and he didn't stop until someone stopped assuming that he was a reasonable person and basically said 'I saw math equations posted in Flow with my own eyes. Are you calling me a liar?') Quite a lot are problems that could be solved, if someone assigned a team to work on it for, say, five years. (That won't happen. Don't get your hopes up, even a little bit.)
I like parts of this system, and I dislike parts of this system. It may be better suited for Teahouses (see the Teahouse at the French Wikipedia) than for, say, the spam blacklist.
Despite its limitations, it's getting used. About 10,000 users have tried it (at some point) for their own user talk pages. By local community request, it's the default for all new talk namespaces on this wiki (any admin can turn it on/off for any given page).
What's always frustrating to me are long-time editors who have never used it, or even seen it, who think they know what they're talking about, usually because, years ago, they read a comment from the guy claiming that you can't do math in Flow, or that you can't edit other people's comments (you can, although here at mw.org, it's configured so that IPs can't change your comments). So when I see comments about it on enwiki, I sometimes ping people to a thread here. They don't all like it (that's perfectly valid), but at least they know what they're talking about.
BTW, the default editing system at this wiki is the visual mode. Use the pencil icon in the corner if you prefer typing in wikitext. (It'll remember the editor you used last time, and give that one to you next time.)
Welcome to the way the rest of the world works. (The English Wikipedia demanded its removal, of course.)
I did not know this existed. What is it? :-)
It's original name was "Flow" (as in workflow), but development stopped before it got past this stage, which only supports discussions (rather than AFD and ArbCom case pages, which is what it was intended to support. There is no good reason why ArbCom's votes should have to be manually edited). It was renamed Structured Discussions a while ago, since all it can do is discussions.
Ohhhh! I’ve heard of Flow before but never seen it in action. Thanks for introducing me!
You're welcome.
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