On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 5:30 AM, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com>
wrote:
That's precisely my point. Because current talk page discussions are - on
the software level - unstructured, it allows social conventions to do
everything you want it to do structure wise, and to invent new uses as we
go. The domain model is just that complicated that we found that we need
that power in implementation (even if we all(tm)[citation needed] agree
that the current discussion form is pretty horrible UI wise). If you're
going to force a software structure on in it will most likely not be as
powerful[1] as what there is now and represents a trade off without us
having a clear sight of what we will lose, even if we can have a somewhat
clear picture of what we will gain: easier use and navigatability for the
kinds of discussions we do support. Discussing a trade off where only one
side is known is hard.
[1] i.e. a tree structure is far less powerful than what we have now to
approximate the domain, a dag with dividable nodes probably comes closer,
and is already fiendishly complicated to pull off on a UI level. And then I
haven't even gone in to the current practices of taking a comment back by
striking it, which means that nodes aren't only arbitrarily and multiply
dividable, but also mutable over time in a linear(?) history? 'sblood man,
discussions are complicated.
-- Martijn
The assumption I think you are making here is that the goal is to get a
discussion system with maximum functionality and flexibility. I think that
is an interesting goal as a technical exercise, but I'm not sure I agree
that this is a valuable goal for Wikimedia (although it may be for
MediaWiki). The problem we have is one of non-technical users put off by
excessively technical (and unstructured) means of communication.
So I think a much better goal, and one that I know others share and has
been the focus of development work, is to adopt a system of communication
that is easy and intuitive for as many participants as possible. This may
mean the problem of inventing a better mousetrap needs to be set aside in
favor of determining what mechanism is the most familiar and easy for the
majority of Wikimedia users. If that leads us to adopting something similar
to vBulletin or another threading w/quotes discussion system, then so be
it. This is a little part of what I think Risker was getting at; the
technical side is focused on creating neat new products and features, but
not always necessarily solving the problems that we actually have.
As a general principle, I see this kind of thinking come up a lot in
Wikimedia settings - the community is deeply committed to a very innovative
project, which leads to the impulse to be innovative in many ways. But the
core innovation is the wiki and the mission; it's not necessary to invent
the best-in-class [governance system, donation system, discussion
mechanism, feedback tool, etc.], and in many cases the distraction and
uncertainty of trying to innovative in multiple channels presents a
liability.