On Wed, Jul 22, 2015 at 10:52 AM, Dmitry Brant <dbrant@wikimedia.org> wrote:

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.

Most editors probably own multiple devices, so a partial but good editing experience is probably more useful than a full but poor one. Large-scale article editing is never going to be competitive on mobile due to the inherent limitations of the platform such as the tiny display and slow text input, so most editors will always use their laptops for that. But if other pieces of their workload, which *can* be done well on mobile (such as messaging or patrolling or processing certain backlogs) are well-supported, that means more desktop time for actual article editing.

So I don't think the kind of interdependencies that you mention exist. Much of the talk page communication can be detached from editing and done in a different part of the day, and providing an interface for that will mean that editors can check their messages while on the bus and do the editing when at home. (And for users who do not have other means to access Wikipedia than a phone, a partial experience is probably still better than no experience.)

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