On Sat, Sep 12, 2009 at 1:03 AM, Philippe Beaudette < pbeaudette@wikimedia.org> wrote:
On Sep 11, 2009, at 7:06 PM, Samuel Klein wrote:
LiquidThreads was developed for that purpose, but it seems to have been largely discarded, with no significant interest from the community, the foundation or the usability team - why?
This may be part of the solution, but there is more to your statement above. LiquidThreads is receiving more attention now; Erik probably has the latest status.
LiquidThreads will be deploying in a small live environment very soon, according to a conversation I had with werdna day before yesterday.
Philippe
yes, LiquidThreads holds great promise for improved communication (at
least, on-Wiki communication). user:Werdna (Andrew Garrett) who is developing it was surprisedhttp://blog.werdn.us/2009/09/so-that-was-wikimania/to note at Wikimania how few people knew that it was being revamped as a matter of priority. Videos of his presentations on the topic at Wikimania can be seen here http://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/Lightning_talks(day two video, starting at 13:30) and herehttp://wikimania2009.wikimedia.org/wiki/File:200908271634-Angela_B_Starling-BOF_MediaWiki_Usability_discussion.ogg(starting at 20:00) and I believe it will be live-trialled at the Stratey.wikimedia.org wiki soon.
As for the discussion of "how to improve foundation-l" I must concur with what Lars Aronssen said about how the vast majority of followers of this list "lurk". Tim & Austin I agree with everything you've said here too. As has been mentioned by Henning Schlottmann a issue with web-based fora (e.g. message boards) is that they are "pull based". Yes, this can be seen as a problem and hopefully there are ways to enable more "push" functionality. However, to reverse the question, one of the major reasons why foundation-l is so despised by many is precisely *because* it is push-based. Everyone.Gets.Every.Single.Message - this just doesn't scale. Thank god for threaded-chat in modern email clients is all I can say. So, whilst having everything appear in your inbox is a good feature to have if you want it, IMO the onus should be on the individual to chose to opt-in to a thread/discussion rather than the email system which forces people to opt-out (or at least tune-out or at worst unsubscribe). A web-based forum allows you to bypass discussions you do not want to engage in freeing your time/mindspace for discussions that are more relevant to your interests. And, for those that wish to follow every single thread, there surely must be an option to be automatically notified every time there is a new posting or a new thread created.
-Liam [[witty lama]]