To Flow: on featured article discussions

Re: [Wikimedia-l] The Lighter Side...

Amir E. Aharoni

15 Sep 2014 15 Sep '14

9:12 a.m.

My 2 agorot in the Flow or not Flow discussion: A prominent Hebrew Wikipedia user started a discussion about his impression that too few people participate in the discussions about nominating featured articles.[1] This Wikipedia has about 700 active and 150 very active editors[2]; the number of participants in these discussions is usually much less than twenty, often less than ten. Now I don't know what are other people's reasons not to participate in them; maybe a lot of them are just not interested in discussing featured articles. I know what my reasons are, though. I am quite interested in such discussions, and I would participate in them, but I don't, because in the few times I tried, it filled my watchlist with unnecessary notifications about other people's opinions. These opinions are relevant, but the way they are presented in the watchlist is unhelpful and I feel that it wastes my time. More structure in such discussions would encourage me to participate. The current version of Flow doesn't solve this problem: Its notifications are far from being well-adapted even for simple talk pages, and it doesn't even attempt to be adapted to a more structured decision-making discussion like Featured Article nomination. But I do believe that Flow is in the direction of resolving these problems. Flow will have to be carefully tweaked for each discussion scenario, but the general idea of having adaptable structured discussion is a good start. The frequent argument for remaining with the current talk pages and not moving to Flow is that the current talk pages work. Well, at least in this case they don't, and Flow could be a solution to that. [1] Roughly corresponding to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TFAR [2] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaHE.htm -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

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Risker

15 Sep 15 Sep

10:47 a.m.

English Wikipedia rarely has more than 10-15 people participating in featured content candidate discussions/reviews. I'm hugely impressed that Hebrew Wikipedia has this level of participation in similar discussions. I suspect this is a higher level of participation than is seen on most projects, and wonder why editors at your project think that the current level of participation is too low. I also don't understand why you find your watchlist flooded using the current discussion process, but this may be a difference in preferences or in the setup of your specific project. Risker/Anne On 15 September 2014 05:12, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

...

Federico Leva (Nemo)

11:06 a.m.

Amir E. Aharoni, 15/09/2014 11:12:

...

These opinions are relevant, but the way they are presented in the watchlist is unhelpful and I feel that it wastes my time.

If the reason is so trivial (on it.wiki it's certainly more complex than that), sounds like something that subpagination and/or RSS feeds can solve. Can you describe exactly what you'd like to follow and how your time is currently wasted? Nemo

Amir E. Aharoni

11:12 a.m.

...

If the reason is so trivial (on it.wiki it's certainly more complex than that), sounds like something that subpagination and/or RSS feeds can solve

I expected supagination to come up. The English Wikipedia uses it for Articles for Deletion (AfD) and for a lot of other things. I tried to follow AfD for some time, and I had similar issues. Subpagination is hack upon a hack. There's nothing wrong about simply admitting that treating everything as a generic wiki page and building upon that has its limits. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

Federico Leva (Nemo)

12:13 p.m.

Amir E. Aharoni, 15/09/2014 13:12:

...

The English Wikipedia uses it for Articles for Deletion (AfD) and for a lot of other things. I tried to follow AfD for some time, and I had similar issues.

Issues which you still haven't described. Nemo

Amir E. Aharoni

12:25 p.m.

2014-09-15 15:13 GMT+03:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>om>:

...

> Amir E. Aharoni, 15/09/2014 13:12: > The English Wikipedia uses it for Articles for Deletion (AfD) and for a

lot

...

of other things. I tried to follow AfD for some time, and I had similar issues.

Issues which you still haven't described.

Seeing notifications about articles in the same watchlist with these notifications is already an issue. Seeing only the last "support" or "oppose" notification, and having to go to the page to see the current state of affairs (yes, I know it's not a vote). The alternative would be to set watchlist to show all changes and not just the last one, but then it would show one row per change or a group of rows per page, and that would make it even more cluttered. Seeing the adding of new pages, archival of old discussions and discussions of pages in the same way. Archival I don't want to see at all. The action of adding a page and making a comment about a page should look different, but in the current watchlist they are the same. Subpagination doesn't really help with that. These are issues that are familiar to all of us. We are accustomed to them, but it doesn't mean that the condition is good. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

Federico Leva (Nemo)

1:03 p.m.

Amir E. Aharoni, 15/09/2014 14:25:

...

Seeing notifications about articles in the same watchlist with these notifications is already an issue.

There's a namespace selector. I select ns0 + talk when I'm in editing mode and invert that when I'm not.

...

Seeing only the last "support" or "oppose" notification, and having to go to the page to see the current state of affairs (yes, I know it's not a vote).

You can load the last revision of the page via RSS/Atom, if that's what you want.

...

The alternative would be to set watchlist to show all changes and not just the last one, but then it would show one row per change or a group of rows per page, and that would make it even more cluttered.

That never looked cluttered to me. :)

...

Seeing the adding of new pages, archival of old discussions and discussions of pages in the same way. Archival I don't want to see at all.

Use a bot, ask them to mark edits minor?

...

The action of adding a page and making a comment about a page should look different, but in the current watchlist they are the same.

Subpagination does help with this because you can filter new page creations. All the problems you mentioned I consider solved since about 2006 on it.wiki, modernise your practices. ;) Nemo

Marc A. Pelletier

1:07 p.m.

On 09/15/2014 09:03 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:

...

All the problems you mentioned I consider solved since about 2006 on it.wiki, modernise your practices.

... isn't that what Flow is trying to do? -- Marc

Federico Leva (Nemo)

1:18 p.m.

Marc A. Pelletier, 15/09/2014 15:07:

...

On 09/15/2014 09:03 AM, Federico Leva (Nemo) wrote:

> All the problems you mentioned I consider solved since about 2006 on > it.wiki, modernise your practices.

... isn't that what Flow is trying to do?

By making me and Amir talk of how to use wiki pages, you mean? ;-) Maybe; I've not seen much of that and it would be very useful if editors started collecting user stories likes his and exchanging practices on how to manage them. I expect half of what would come up to be problems with Watchlist and RecentChanges, applying to any namespace and only made worse by the repeated attempt to take stuff out of them. Those are THE central engines of any wiki and I've only seen cosmetic actions around them, except the work of a handful volunteer heros like Hoo and MatmaRex (and sometimes the Wikidata team). Nemo

Amir E. Aharoni

1:24 p.m.

2014-09-15 16:18 GMT+03:00 Federico Leva (Nemo) <nemowiki(a)gmail.com>om>:

...

I expect half of what would come up to be problems with Watchlist and RecentChanges, applying to any namespace and only made worse by the repeated attempt to take stuff out of them. Those are THE central engines of any wiki and I've only seen cosmetic actions around them,

That is quite true. A deep modernization of the Watchlist should be coupled with the Flow poject somehow. Either Special:Watchlist itself should be profoundly redesigned and upgraded, or the Flow+Echo notifications should become so good that they can replace it. -- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com ‪“We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore‬

Diego Moya

2:55 p.m.

On 15 September 2014 15:24, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

...

Danny Horn

5:24 p.m.

Figuring out how Flow integrates with the watchlist and Echo is one of the toughest and most important parts of the project. The feedback that the team got from the last couple releases was actually pretty diverse, and showed us that there's going to be a lot of work ahead of us to figure out how to represent Flow activity. Some people are seeing Flow messages as really important, something that they want to get updates on right away -- and "right away" can mean either in their watchlist where they go all the time, or in Echo where they'll see the notification. Other people see Flow messages as something they'll get to later, and they want to see more of a message inbox. The interesting thing for me is that this doesn't seem to break down along "new user" vs "power user" lines. People with the same level of experience and activity can still use and think about those tools differently. The work that we've done on the Flow/Echo/watchlist integration so far is just a couple steps into what is going to be a longer process. We need to build more options into the feature to help people choose what kind of notifications they want to see, and where. Danny On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 7:55 AM, Diego Moya <dialmove(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

On 15 September 2014 15:24, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

That is quite true. A deep modernization of the Watchlist should be

coupled

with the Flow poject somehow. Either Special:Watchlist itself should be profoundly redesigned and upgraded, or the Flow+Echo notifications should become so good that they can replace it.

Whatever you do, please don't try to replace the Watchlist with Echo notifications; they serve quite different roles and are complementary, not a surrogate. The recent backlash that Echo received when it was updated last week was in part because of that, as it included as notifications all the updates that would normally be seek out at the watchlist and therefore shouldn't generate an alert. I agree that the Watchlist could be enhanced with more granular filters, groupings and search functions. A lot of user workflows are based on personal usages of the watchlist, which work as the de-facto coordination tool between editors participating in the same projects. _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

Diego Moya

16 Sep 16 Sep

10:51 a.m.

On 15 September 2014 19:24, Danny Horn <dhorn(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Some people are seeing Flow messages as really important, something that they want to get updates on right away -- and "right away" can mean either in their watchlist where they go all the time, or in Echo where they'll see the notification. Other people see Flow messages as something they'll get to later, and they want to see more of a message inbox.

Danny Horn

7:32 p.m.

Diego, that is definitely what we're thinking about for the subscriptions options -- giving users the ability to choose whether they want to subscribe to every new thread, or just get a notification that a new thread has been created. The balance that we have to figure out is how to provide options on that page-by-page level without forcing people to go through two clicks every time. Right now, the list of items on the roadmap is on the Mediawiki Flow page. [1] We're not enforcing a strict centralized place for discussions right now; they're happening in a few different places. I'm going to be talking with the Community team later this week to see what we can do about that. I think the EE mailing list [2] is probably the best place to see what's current and talk with the team. We'll probably be tackling the subscription/notifications question in more detail in a few weeks. Right now, we're working on Hide, the Table of Contents, Search and the LiquidThreads transition. There's a lot to do! But we'll definitely be getting back to notification options before too long. Danny [1]: Mediawiki Flow page: https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow#Roadmap [2]: EE mailing list: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/ee On Tue, Sep 16, 2014 at 3:51 AM, Diego Moya <dialmove(a)gmail.com> wrote:

...

On 15 September 2014 19:24, Danny Horn <dhorn(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

Some people are seeing Flow messages as really important, something that they want to get updates on right away -- and "right away" can mean

either

in their watchlist where they go all the time, or in Echo where they'll

see

the notification. Other people see Flow messages as something they'll get to later, and they want to see more of a message inbox.

And then you have people like me who see them as *both*, just not for the same pages. I've suggested that some topics and boards should raise notifications and not others, depending on how important each topic is for the user. At least one other editor suggested that this could be done with a check ("notify me of updates for this board") to be selected on the pop-up that appears when you add a topic to your watchlist. Is there someone taking note of all these scattered suggestions in a central place where they can be discussed? _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

Diego Moya

17 Sep 17 Sep

9:04 a.m.

On 16 September 2014 21:32, Danny Horn <dhorn(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Danny, that is definitely *not* what I'm thinking about, :-( and there are nuances that are not getting through the conversation noise - or at least I've been so far unable to explain myself as to what those nuances are. Can you at least acknowledge that you understand the difference between "subscription" (with respect to items appearing at the Watchlist) and "notifications" (with respect to Echo)? I haven't seen that difference tackled in any of the communications from the development team, although several editors have recognized it as significant.

...

The balance that we have to figure out is how to provide options on that page-by-page level without forcing people to go through two clicks every time.

I'd go with the route of allowing users to select the default value for both subscriptions and notifications (with new users subscribed and notified of all conversations they post to, and experienced editors with lots of pages changing the default to "don't subscribe"). The current subscription check can be set up that way (in Preferences->Watchlist->Advanced options), and it works very well. If those options were available, I would configure mine to "subscribe to all topics" and "don't notify me about any topic" as the default.

...

We'll probably be tackling the subscription/notifications question in more detail in a few weeks. Right now, we're working on Hide, the Table of Contents, Search and the LiquidThreads transition. There's a lot to do! But we'll definitely be getting back to notification options before too long.

Amir E. Aharoni

10:46 a.m.

Nitpick: If watchlist and notifications remain separated, it makes more sense to me to call the operation that adds something to watchlist "watch" rather than ''subscribe". בתאריך 17 בספט 2014 12:05, "Diego Moya" <dialmove(a)gmail.com> כתב:

...

On 16 September 2014 21:32, Danny Horn <dhorn(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

thread

has been created.

The balance that we have to figure out is how to provide options on that page-by-page level without forcing people to go through

two

clicks every time.

We'll probably be tackling the subscription/notifications question in

detail in a few weeks. Right now, we're working on Hide, the Table of Contents, Search and the LiquidThreads transition. There's a lot to do!

But

we'll definitely be getting back to notification options before too long.

That's great, there's a time for tackling each problem in a long term project. When the time comes, I hope you gather a sample of desired workflows and needs (including mine), *before* you start analyzing possible designs that solve them. ;-) _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l(a)lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>

Diego Moya

11:20 a.m.

On 17 September 2014 12:46, Amir E. Aharoni <amir.aharoni(a)mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:

...

Nitpick: If watchlist and notifications remain separated, it makes more sense to me to call the operation that adds something to watchlist "watch" rather than ''subscribe".

Good catch, that makes sense for me too. That would make "subscribe" a high level concept, easier to explain to newcomers, that is composed of both "watched threads" and "notifications" that expert editors could handle in more fine-grained detail.

Martijn Hoekstra

16 Sep 16 Sep

12:02 p.m.

On Mon, Sep 15, 2014 at 7:24 PM, Danny Horn <dhorn(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:

...

Figuring out how Flow integrates with the watchlist and Echo is one of the toughest and most important parts of the project.

I think that may be an overstatement. I'm not saying it isn't tough, but exploring in what ways wikipages are currently used as a vehicle for organizing discussions across different projects and different wikis (and possibly third parties), and supporting all those different use-cases seems far tougher than how to interact with watchlists and notifications. -- Martijn

Amir E. Aharoni

15 Sep 15 Sep

1:19 p.m.

...

> The alternative would be to set watchlist to show all changes and > not just the last one, but then it would show one row per change or a

group

...

of rows per page, and that would make it even more cluttered.

That never looked cluttered to me. :)

It did to me, and AFAIK, you and I started editing Wikimedia roughly at the same time (give or a take a year or two). A matter of taste, I guess. When I show the Watchlist to new people, they interpret it in wildly different ways, all of which are incorrect.

...

Subpagination does help with this because you can filter new page

creations.

...

All the problems you mentioned I consider solved since about 2006 on it.wiki, modernise your practices.

Sorry, but I wouldn't call subpagination and namespace selection "modernised". To begin with, to be able to use these things, one needs to learn what namespaces and subpages are; how many websites do you know that people need to *learn* how to use? I certainly don't want Wikipedia to be such a website. I want people to come here to write articles; this includes being able to participate in discussions about articles, and this shouldn't include the need to learn about namespaces and subpages. Also, why do I need to modernize my practices *separately* from other projects? I can understand that articles need to be written in each language (and I'm developing software to make that easier), I understand that the human side of community practices needs to develop on each project separately? Most projects in most languages - that's many hundreds of projects - don't have admins and techies that can manually customize templates, namespaces, bots, RSS, and so on. It doesn't scale. Flow basically productizes[1] these practices, makes them common, and removes the need to *learn* stuff. No, it's not ready yet, but the direction is right. [1] I'll keep repeating that I hate the word "productize", but I love the idea behind it.

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participants (7)

Amir E. Aharoni
Danny Horn
Diego Moya
Federico Leva (Nemo)
Marc A. Pelletier
Martijn Hoekstra
Risker