On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 5:42 AM, Kevin Wayne Williams <
kwwilliams(a)kwwilliams.com> wrote:
Danny Horn schreef op 2015/03/17 om 21:08:
And I'm glad to hear that this thread has come close to almost inspiring
optimism. That's what I'm here for.
In a sample of one. Still, I guess one finds solace where one can.
While this feature has encountered and keeps encountering resistance and
opposition, it is also collecting adoption and enthusiasm, both in the
editing [1] and technical communities. Looking only at the dark or the
bright side of the picture helps nobody.
mediawiki.org has always been a place for technical experimentation and for
eating our own food. This is why LiquidThreads became a thing there, and
this is also why it makes sense to keep pushing Flow in that space. I
really care about newcomers and I think Flow is an essential piece for
onboarding them [1], but as a self-proclaimed experienced user of online
discussion tools, I also like Flow by its own merit. I praised wikitext
discussions, and I praised LQT discussions, but each on their own decade so
to say. Even if Flow is not perfect today, it improves every month, and I'd
rather help improving it than stopping it. [2]
This thread is clearly not a sample of one. I am personally delighted (and
I'm choosing carefully this word) with the work the Flow/Collaboration team
has been doing identifying what is an objective problem, pushing firmly but
flexibly a vision, and communicating (listening/speaking/acting) with all
their surroundings, release after release. They are listening and
responsive in an array of channels that probably none of us can enumerate.
I don't think there is any single relevant piece of feedback in all these
conversations that hasn't been translated to a Phabricator task, and I
don't think there is any relevant comment in any Flow task of Phabricator
that the maintainers haven't replied to, explaining their thoughts and
plans.
[1] For instance, last Autumn I participated with my volunteer hat in
Amical Wikimedia's annual meeting. This is a small but very active and well
organized community, and reaching out to new editors is their top priority.
They said that VisualEditor is now the essential piece in the many
workshops they organize, and they explaned that the new moment of confusion
is when they introduce the importance of discussions and collaboration.
Having to move from VisualEditor's familiar features and UI to a blank
space where equal signs, colons, and tildes are an essential requirement,
systematically confuses new editors. For this reason, and because
experienced editors can get away with some details when their primary goal
is to onboard future experienced editors, ca.wiki has been testing Flow for
a few months now, and they want it deployed to more pages and namespaces.
There, it's basically the Flow maintainers who are pushing the break.
[2]
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/maniphest/query/OouIbfQn0iB8/#R