On 19 March 2015 at 11:08, Jon Robson jdlrobson@gmail.com wrote:
On 19 Mar 2015 7:55 am, "Brad Jorsch (Anomie)" bjorsch@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 9:42 PM, Danny Horn dhorn@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:Sdrqdcffddyz0je... ,
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.
The dogfooding has been happening for a while on WMF's own office-wiki. We haven't heard any results about that. Is the system being used more than the wikitext system? (i.e., are there more "talk page" comments now than there were before?) Have users expressed satisfaction/dissatisfaction with the system? Have they been surveyed? Do they break down into groups (e.g., engineering loves it, grants hates it, etc...)? I hear some stories (including stories that suggest some groups of staff have pretty much abandoned talk pages on office-wiki and are now reverting to emails instead) but without any documentary evidence or analysis it's unreasonable to think that it is either a net positive OR a net negative.
Risker/Anne