But more importantly, you mentioned yourself that talk pages are really part of the _editing_ experience. And, quite frankly, we have to remind ourselves that the apps are still light years away from having a good editing experience. 

I think Dan Garry was the last person who I heard say "I don't want great to be the enemy of good," which I think is worth keeping in mind here.  Is chat functionality something that only delivers value when paired with full editing capabilities, or that can deliver user (and organization) value on its own?  Seems like a good question/experiment to me.

Also, this is yet another reason why we need push notifications (Gather/Watchlist + Chat = MOAR ENGAGEMENTZ \o/).

On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 1:52 PM, Dmitry Brant <dbrant@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Thanks for taking initiative on this, Michael! Talk pages are indeed part of the life-blood of Wikipedia, and should ideally be accessible from the app.  Here, however, are the challenges I see with the kind of implementation that you're proposing:

Amir correctly notes that Flow is gradually poising itself to replace traditional talk pages, being backed by structured data and a nice API that the apps will be able to use natively. If we want to get talk pages "right," we would need to implement a great native presentation of Flow.

But more importantly, you mentioned yourself that talk pages are really part of the _editing_ experience. And, quite frankly, we have to remind ourselves that the apps are still light years away from having a good editing experience. Therefore, providing access to talk pages without providing the other fundamentals that are central to editing (moderation tools, watchlists, diffs, notifications, etc) may be putting the cart before the horse, and may lead to confusion. In fact, I'm not sure if any *one* of those editing features makes sense without all the others. And to implement all of those features in the apps would require a department-wide focus on editing, which is currently not the case.

All that being said, I'm not opposed to making gradual progress towards better editing features, as long as we maintain our focus on creating a beautiful reading experience.  To sum up, I'm not opposed to adding an option to go to the Talk page of an article, but until the app has a more robust editing experience, I would suggest that this option takes the user to the Mobile Web version of the talk page (like we currently do for article history), and make it much less prominent than a primary action in the Toolbar.



On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 1:34 PM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
> Now, this is enabled on certain pages at the moment, no?

Yes, only on particular pages.

At least one Wikipedia has it on Village Pump - Catalan: https://ca.wikipedia.org/wiki/Viquip%C3%A8dia:La_taverna/Novetats .

AFAIK, the intention is to transition all talk and discussion ages to Flow some day, and I don't know when will it actually happen. Maybe Danny has a better idea.


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2015-07-22 12:28 GMT-05:00 Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org>:
I see. Now, this is enabled on certain pages at the moment, no? Or is there a means of activating the Flow mobile-compatible mode with well formed URLs or something like that for any given <lang>.m.wikipedia.org page? Apologies, I do most of my Talk page stuff on desktop typically. But that said, that is a pretty nice layout on those links you listed!

-Adam

On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 10:02 AM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
No, I'm not sure what does mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop do for Flow.

I was referring to rendering of Flow on mobile websites, for example https://m.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:CX or https://he.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/User_talk:Amire80 .

Trying it on an actual phone gives the best effect.

Though there certainly are some issues ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T93430 ), Flow pages work FAR better on phones than the classic talk pages.


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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
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‪“We're living in pieces,
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2015-07-22 11:58 GMT-05:00 Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org>:
Amir, are you referring to use of the inbuilt "desktop" mode of Flow, such as https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:MediaWiki?mobileaction=toggle_view_desktop ?

-Adam

On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 8:30 AM, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
It's probably a dilettante-ish comment, but for a while already Flow has been working quite well on mobile web, incomparably better than the old talk pages, and it could be Flow's biggest "selling point". My intuition tells me that work to support talk pages on mobile should focus more on Flow and less on the old talk pages.


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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
‪“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

2015-07-22 10:12 GMT-05:00 Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org>:
Moving discussion to mobile-l. 

On Wednesday, July 22, 2015, Michael Holloway <mholloway@wikimedia.org> wrote:
OK by me.  

On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 10:53 AM, Adam Baso <abaso@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Okay to move this discussion to mobile-l?

I'm talking with Editing (includes VE and Flow) this morning about engagement model and their short to medium term roadmap, which should be helpful in your guys' examination of bridge/stopgap solutions for this pretty fundamental stuff. 


On Wednesday, July 22, 2015, Michael Holloway <mholloway@wikimedia.org> wrote:
Hey all,

Last week at Wikimania I had some interesting conversations about the Android app.  On the whole, people really like the new and improved app, but there are definitely frustrations with the editing experience -- from people thinking it's not possible to edit in the app, to uninstalling it so that Google links direct them to the mobile website, where they vastly prefer the editing experience.  Editors are a small but important group and I don't think we're doing them justice at the moment.  Although reading is our focus, I would suggest we devote some resources to improving the editing experience as well.  (It turns out that Abbey Ripstra and the design research team are running a survey research study on mobile contribution experiences as I write, so I'll be interested to hear what insights they have to offer.)

I also had a conversation with Asaf Bartov, who mentioned that it would be nice to be able to access talk pages in the mobile app.  I'm sympathetic to this; most users may not care about talk pages, but they're very important to the editing experience, and even for savvy readers they offer useful commentary about what's on (or off) the page and why.  So yesterday afternoon I hacked up a POC patch to add a toolbar button to flip back and forth between main articles and talk pages.  Have a look and let me know what you think!


Cheers,
Michael

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