On 19 Mar 2015 7:55 am, "Brad Jorsch (Anomie)" <bjorsch(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 9:42 PM, Danny Horn <dhorn(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Brad: unfortunately, it's really hard to tell very much from a
conversation
> with messages like "3: Post C: reply to Post
A". You could do that with
the
old model, the
new model or the perfect magic Nobel-Prize-winning
discussion threading still to be discovered, and it would probably look
like nonsense in all three.
I shouldn't have used both numbers and post-names, but once I realized
that
it was already a bit late and it won't let me edit
those posts. Someone
with appropriate permissions is free to go back and edit them all to
remove
the number prefix and let the alphabetical order of
the post-names suffice
to indicate the chronological order of the postings, if that would make it
less confusing for you.
The point is the structure you're displaying doesn't make any sense, not
that the content of my messages isn't anything that might make sense on
its
own. My "content" is explicitly simplified
to illustrate the failings in
the displayed structure. Structure should *facilitate* understanding, but
in your demo I'd find that understanding the underlying structure of the
conversation would be *despite* the broken display-structure.
Nor is the point that people can screw up wikitext talk pages in ways that
are even more confusing. That's a given, but Flow is supposed to do
better.
Right now it's worse than a well-formatted
wikitext talk page (which has
the advantage that human users can *fix* the structure when a newbie
breaks
it).
Comparing
http://flow-tests.wmflabs.org/wiki/Wikitext version of
Topic:Sdrqdcffddyz0jeo to
http://flow-tests.wmflabs.org/wiki/Wikitext_version_of_Topic:Sdrqdcffddyz0j…
,
I find it much easier in the latter to see what is a
reply to what.
> We've tried in our testing to pretend that we're having real
conversations,
> so we could see whether there's any logical
way to get to eight levels
of
nested
threading. It's not easy to organize make-believe conversations,
but if you want to start a thread, I'd be happy to fire up a few
sockpuppets and pretend to talk about something with you.
No thanks. Pretend "real" conversations are ok for a first assessment at
usability, but by nature they're likely to be vapid and unlikely to have
the inter-post complexity of actual conversations on-wiki where people are
concentrating on actually communicating rather than on forcing a
conversation for the sake of testing.
Let's all be happy then that we are replacing an unloved broken talk
extension with Flow on a wiki where we have real conversations then ...? :)
actually dogfooding will make it much easier for us to communicate errors
with the Flow team and help improve the software.
I truly hope that soon we can get to a point where we can enable flow on
all pages on
mediawiki.org and this seems like the obvious first step.
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