Yes, the people working on Flow have mastered wiki text talk pages. One of the engineers is User:Superm401, an admin on enwiki, and the product manager is Danny Horn, who has been a regular MediaWiki user for years.

As a meta point, you don't actually need to be a hardcore power user of any particular product to understand user needs. It helps, but it can also actually hurt when you're trying to design something new that doesn't have the same flaws. The field of user experience design and usability testing has a host of techniques to enable a skilled person to investigate and understand user needs that don't yet know through direct experience. That is why Wikimedia hires people with academic and professional experience in these fields.
On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 6:06 AM MZMcBride <z@mzmcbride.com> wrote:
Vibha Bamba wrote:
> I tried to get into that conversation and leave a message for Kevin
>Song. I could not use the regular talk page after using flow for
>Hovercards for the last 12 months. This is what millions of readers
>getting into the system feel like.

Click edit.

> I hope flow ships this year.
> Concerned sighs.

Just curious, what's the concern? Wikipedia's SEO? Have you read comments
on other sites (e.g., YouTube) and compared to comments on Wikimedia
wikis? There's a real cost to reducing barrier to entry. And, for what
it's worth, tens of thousands of people engage in lengthy, sometimes
multi-year, conversations using wikitext. Perhaps you're the outlier. :-)

I hope people working directly on Flow have mastered wikitext talk pages.
As we've previously discussed on this mailing list, it's incredibly
difficult to build a better solution without first fully understanding the
use-cases, requirements, and intricacies of the current system.

MZMcBride



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