On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 5:42 AM, Kevin Wayne Williams < kwwilliams@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