Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
Much more importantly, Flow very much does cover basic
talk pages. You can
write a title and an OP and get people to reply. This has been working for
many months already. This is my definition of "covering basic talk pages".
Even more importantly is that you can write a title and an OP and get
people to reply ON THEIR PHONES. This is nearly impossible on the classic
talk pages; on them you are lucky to even manage to read the existing
discussions, and typing a reply requires extra finger-acrobatics. With
Flow it's as easy as on Twitter. I do almost no coding for Mobile
Frontend and apps, but I'm a kind of a volunteer mobile technologies
ambassador in my home wiki, and good mobile support for talk pages is the
#1 request that I hear from veteran editors with regards to using
Wikipedia on their phones. This is another thing that Flow has been doing
for many months already.
I think most of the points you raise here are true of LiquidThreads or
_any_ prototype of a discussion system. Yes, you get a reply button
instead of needing ":: ~~~~" wikitext. That's great, I agree, but after
having watched LiquidThreads rot and then seeing a lot of time, money, and
effort put into Flow, I'm pretty dissatisfied with the deliverable being
essentially a very intricate proof-of-concept. I think not getting Flow
fully deployed to Wikimedia wikis is objectively a large failure to
deliver. Consequently, it seems most prudent to be asking what went wrong
and how it will be better next time. The underlying reality is that we
still need a better on-wiki discussion system and it now looks like
neither LiquidThreads nor Flow are going to be it.
MZMcBride