On Thu, Mar 19, 2015 at 8:18 AM, Risker
<risker.wp(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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.
From what I remember officewiki is pretty unused by most of the staff, so
I'd doubt you'd get much usable feedback there.
As someone who's used mediawiki for 10+ years I can say that *anything* is
better than wikitext for discussion. I have a certain bias towards LQT and
such, but that's because I actually want to use discussion pages for
discussion and wikitext is basically the worst user experience in the world
in this regard. You have a bias towards wikitext because it's been the only
option and Wikimedia wikis have weirdly embraced the functionality and
freedom it provides. Having that freedom hampered is surely painful to
powerusers, but the new user experience isn't even comparable it's so much
better.
I think you're mistaking me for someone else. I too have used wikitext for
10+ years - even though today I do the majority of my mainspace edits using
Visual Editor. I get the idea of a better way of having discussions, and I
also am happy that VE is well on its way. But quite honestly, what I'm
seeing with Flow is...well, it reminds me of nothing more than the kinds of
discussion systems that seemed old-fashioned and clunky even before I
started editing Wikipedia. It wasn't envisioned as a discussion system, it
was envisioned as a "workflow" system, and it shows. I routinely cannot
tell who is responding to whom in Flow threads today on seldom-used and
seldom-edited pages (I've never seen it used at all in any fast-moving
discussions) and I'm hardly stupid - I've been participating in online
discussion forums since the 1990s too.
I am not married to the idea of using Wikitext, but I don't see the benefit
in making an irreversible change in discussion software to a forum that is
intended to be a core, Wikimedia/Mediawiki-wide site (comparable to Meta
and Commons and Wikidata) by applying software that isn't ready for prime
time.
Risker/Anne