On 09/06/2014 17:06 PM, Marc A. Pelletier wrote:
>On 09/06/2014 12:34 PM, Isarra Yos wrote:
>> if the designers do not even understand the basic principles behind a
>> wiki, how can what is developed possibly suit our needs?
>
>You're starting from the presumption that, for some unexplained reason,
>collaborative discussion benefits from being a wiki (as opposed to, you
>know, the actual content).
Wikipedia has been built using that platform. I'd say that's a very good
reason to trust that the model is at least capable. :-)
>Very many people, myself included, believe that a wiki page is an
>*atrocious* medium for discussion.
Sure, and I agree there are many way to improve how users are
engaged into discussion and to keep it manageable. But what is
missing from this conversation is the point that Wikipedia talk
space is not *merely* a medium for discussion: there are other vital
roles that may be hindered by a radical focus on conversation:
tl;dr version: there are times and places that Wikipedia discussion
system needs to be a Microsoft OneNote, and Flow is building us
a Twitter (minus the 140 characters limit).
- The talk space has a strong expectation that it serves as an
archive of all decisions taken in building the articles, i.e. to
show how the sausages are made. The disembodied nature
of Flow topics, which may be shown out of order and distributed
to many boards, makes it hard to recover a sequential view of the
conversations in order as they happened.
- Same thing for keeping user's behavior in check - policy
enforcement often requires that the reviewers can see exactly
what the users saw when they performed some particular
disruptive action, to assess whether it was made in good faith
from incomplete information or a misunderstanding.
- Comment-based discussion is not the only way editors collaborate;
nor discussions are limited to users expressing their particular views
at ordered, pre-defined processes. Some fellow users have already
pointed out how the wiki page works as a shared whiteboard where
semi-structured or free-form content can be worked upon by several
editors, and improved iteratively in an opportunistic way.
Sometimes, that re-shaping of text is made onto the
form of the conversation itself, by re-factoring, splitting, merging
and re-classifying comments from many editors. This would be
hard or impossible to do if the layout of the discussion is fixed
in hardware and comments belong to the poster.
- Wikiprojects develop over time new procedures that better suit
the workflow of their members to achieve their goals. Their
project pages are free-form collages of all the relevant information
they require to do their work, plus discussion processes that may
involve just its members or any other external participant. As
projects cover all the aspects of human knowledge, it would be
difficult to provide a one-size-fits-all interface that may cover all
their needs - the flexibility to compose new layouts and
compilations of content is core to achieve their goals.
- There's a sense now that the community owns the content of all
pages including talk, and can manage it to their liking. That will
disappear if the base model is changed to one based on user-owned
comments. There has not been enough discussion of how that will
affect all the existing projects and guidelines, or whether such change
is acceptable and beneficial to the goal of writing the encyclopedia.
A wiki-like system is very good at achieving those. Some of these
needs have surfaced at previous discussion at Talk:Flow, and some have
been already addressed or influenced the design, but some others are
squarely opposed to the nature of a threaded discussion where the
structure is enforced by the platform. It would be sensible that the
process to gather feedback from the community includes solid answers
to these facets of the tool.