New subject: To Flow or not to Flow

10 Sep 2014

Having listened for the last week or two, here's what I'm getting as the
WMF perspective as the three primary things attempting to be remedied with
Flow:

1) Newcomers and casual contributors have a very hard time using wiki
markup language and find it difficult to participate in talk pages. Flow
will be more intuitive for them.

2) The rendition of talk page discussion threads on mobile devices is bad.
With more people using mobile devices and fewer using laptops, this problem
is only going to become worse over time. Flow will alleviate this problem.

3) Wikitext becomes a sprawling mess on large talk pages, leading to vast
walls of tl;dr text a morass of unsearchable archives. Flow will better
organize discussions.

Is this a fair representation of the rationale behind Flow? Am I missing
some main (as opposed to utopian and theoretical) rationale for the change?

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Now here is a list of the things which talk pages currently do:

1) Mark articles as significant to various work projects and track the
content "grade" for each.

2) Provides details and links for BLP and other policies related to the
subject.

3) Records the history of each page with respect to Articles For Deletion
challenges, Good Article peer review histories, etc.

4) Maintains a record of actual and potential Conflict of Interest
declarations.

5) Registers reader comments about the content.

6) Provides a forum for editor debates over content, sometimes including
large blocks of proposed or removed text and including at times binding
RFCs over content and detailed merger discussions.

7) Accumulates requested edits for protected articles.

In addition, User-talk pages:

8) Gather warning templates and notification messages about editing
problems.

9) Serves as a de facto email system for communication between editors.

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My outside the box suggestion is this: it seems likely that at least some
of the vital functions of talk pages are going to be crushed by Flow and
the mass archiving that its adoption will entail. Perhaps it would be
better for a new third page to be generated for each article:

MAINSPACE PAGE (the article itself)

ABOUT THIS PAGE (templates and permanent records including 1, 2, 3, 4 above)

DISCUSS THIS PAGE (the actual talk page for discussion of content and
requested edits)

Bear in mind that I still have no confidence that Flow will be superior to
wikitext in any but the most superficial ways. I do suggest, however, that
some future permutation of this or some other new discussion format has a
better chance of acceptance by the core volunteer community if it preserves
many essential functions of talk pages unaltered.

Tim Davenport
"Carrite" on En-WP /// "Randy from Boise" on WPO
Corvallis, OR  (USA)

Re: [Wikimedia-l] To Flow or not to Flow