On Sun, Jun 8, 2014 at 8:22 AM, James Forrester jforrester@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Sunday, June 8, 2014, Martijn Hoekstra martijnhoekstra@gmail.com wrote:
On Sun, Jun 8, 2014 at 1:18 AM, Martijn Hoekstra < martijnhoekstra@gmail.com javascript:;> wrote:
Flow stores the comments as a structured tree
That seems a fundamental mistake. A discussion isn't a tree, it's a dag
at
best. It's possible for a single comment in a discussion to refer to zero or more earlier comments,
Flow stores each discussion as a tree, with a Flow "Board" being a forest of discussions for precisely this reason.
That takes care of the issues of replying to one comment (a new node in an existing tree), zero comments (a new root node), but not multiple comments (which would break the tree).
and it's also possible for a single comment to refer to part of an earlier comment, which means a comment isn't an indivisable node.
Hmm. I'm not convinced that there has ever been a successful/useful/good discussion system that encouraged sub-comment structured replies.
Current MediaWiki talk pages do this, as well as mailing lists.
In my experience they are unusable morrasses of confusion. Instead, a lightweight quoting tool achieves the specificity at the least complexity and greatest clarity for users.
I could be convinced otherwise, but it'd need to be a fairly stunning design concept.
J.
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
-- James D. Forrester Product Manager, VisualEditor Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
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