Instead of dropping indents use something like {{od}}
On Tuesday, March 17, 2015, Danny Horn <dhorn(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
(sorry for reposting, the first version had
attachments and wasn't
appearing in the archive)
As a PS to that long post, here's another long post. I mentioned above that
I'd get into more detail about indents and tangents.
Wikitext talk pages use indentation for two different reasons -- to create
visual separation between people's posts, and to create spin-off tangents
that follow a different path than the main flow of conversation in a
thread. They're both important functions, but they don't need the same
mechanism, and I'd argue that trying to do both with indentations makes
wikitext talk pages harder to participate in and understand.
Big, complicated Village pump conversations need lots of room for tangents
and subthreads. A simple back-and-forth conversation between two people
doesn't need that. But we've spent years counting colons and fixing other
people's indentations, to the point where it feels like a conversation can
only be worthwhile if it's diagonal.
The indentation model that we've been using on Flow is kind of an unhappy
compromise between the two different functions, and I don't think anybody
likes it much. It retains the idea that a reply should be indented just
because, but then it only goes to two levels of indentation. Once a thread
reaches the second indentation level, you can't create an out-of-synch
tangent even if you want to.
So we've figured out a new reply/indentation model that separates those two
functions. We've been testing it out on the flow-tests server [1], and
we're going to release it to Mediawiki soon.
Here's how it works:
If you're replying to the most recent post, then your reply just lines up
under the previous message. A two-person back and forth conversation just
looks flat, and the visual separation is noted with the user name and
timestamp.
If you're specifically replying to a previous post, then your reply creates
an indented tangent. If everybody responding on that tangent replies to the
last message in that subthread, then it'll stay at the same indentation
level. But if someone replies to an older message within the subthread,
then that creates a third indentation level. I think we've got it set to a
maximum of 8 possible indentation levels, and we just stop it there because
there's a point where you can't fit a lot of text in each line.
The big idea of the new system is that the indentation should actually mean
something. You should be able to tell the difference between a simple
conversation and a complicated conversation at a glance, and using indented
tangents helps you to spot the places in a conversation where there's a
disagreement or a deeper level of detail.
We've been running tests comparing the old and new indentation models with
several groups, and I think it's promising. You can check out the two
models here:
-- New model:
http://flow-tests.wmflabs.org/wiki/Talk:Something
-- Old model (with 8 levels of indentation):
http://ee-flow.wmflabs.org/wiki/Talk:SomethingElse
So that is the Grand Unified Theory of Flow Indentation, in theory and
practice. I would be happy to hear what you think about it. There is a very
good chance that this model will continue the Flow tradition of pleasing
exactly nobody, and if that's the case, then we can keep talking about it
and making more changes. But there's also a chance that this is brilliant
and solves everything, so I want to give it a shot and see what happens.
On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 3:29 PM, Danny Horn <dhorn(a)wikimedia.org
<javascript:;>> wrote:
Thanks for all of the questions and suggestions.
Flow is still in active
development, and there's a lot of feature work being done right now. Some
of the features that have been mentioned in this thread are actually just
about to be released, and some are coming up over the next month or so.
Here's how it breaks down:
Coming out very soon:
-- The ability to edit other people's posts will be out on Mediawiki by
the end of next week. We’ve made a few interface changes to support that.
Posts that have been edited by someone that isn’t the original poster now
say “Edited by Username 3 minutes ago”, so that it’s easy for everyone to
see what’s happened. When someone edits an existing post, we fixed the
diff
pages so that you can browse between previous and
next changes. [1]
-- Sane threading model, with more levels for replies and tangents --
also
coming out next week. Talking about this feature
gets super lengthy and
complicated, so I’ll write another post right after this one that will
give
all the details for people who are interested.
[2]
-- Admins viewing deleted boards without undeleting it -- coming out in
three weeks. [3]
Working on these next:
-- Moving topics between boards -- We’ve got designs and estimates for
this, and I’m expecting that to come out in April. [4]
-- More powerful watchlist/notification functionality -- This is a very
important feature that will be getting a lot of team attention over the
next month. We need to re-read the mountain of requests that have
accumulated, and reach out again to you for fresh feedback. Improvements
will aim to be continuous and incremental.
Future plans, not scheduled yet:
-- Full wikitext toolbar -- We’re going to release v1 of a VisualEditor
toolbar in the next couple of weeks. This version will just have three
functions: Bold/Italics, Links and Mentions. (Mentions will have
autocomplete with user names that have already participated in the
thread.)
We’ll definitely be doing more work on toolbars
coming up, but we want to
see how this first one works before we make any solid plans.
-- Make the links to threads look nicer -- Yeah, this is annoying. It’s
not in our top five list of annoyances at the moment, but we’ll keep
checking off annoying items. Nicer links will get its turn. [5]
-- No-JS and accessibility -- We’ve done some work on this, and there
will
be more coming up. [6]
So there's a lot of work still to be done, but we're adding a lot of
features. I hope this helps explain where we are in the process.
We’re going to have an Office Hours Google Hangout on Monday at 19:00
UTC,
so we can answer questions and talk about the
project. If people are
interested, we can schedule more of these.
Thanks again for all the specific feature requests and concerns. We’ll be
requesting larger and wider quantities of feedback in the near future, as
some of the upcoming features are planned and built.
Danny
Phabricator tickets mentioned above:
[1] Flow post editing for autoconfirmed users:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T90670
[2] Prototype for new indentation model:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T88501
[3] Admins viewing deleted boards:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T90972
[4] Moving topics between boards:
[5] Less ugly topic page links:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T59154
[6] No-JS tracking:
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T60019
On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 12:51 PM, Derk-Jan Hartman <
d.j.hartman+wmf_ml(a)gmail.com <javascript:;>> wrote:
>
> > On 17 mrt. 2015, at 19:45, Isarra Yos <zhorishna(a)gmail.com
<javascript:;>> wrote:
> >
> > On 17/03/15 15:32, Brad Jorsch (Anomie) wrote:
> >> On Tue, Mar 17, 2015 at 11:17 AM, Marc A. Pelletier <
marc(a)uberbox.org <javascript:;>>
> >> wrote:
> >>
> >>> Indentation is a crappy workaround for when your communication
system
> >>> does not support a sane
threading model - it isn't a threading model
> or
> >>> a substitute for one.
> >>>
> >> Err, what's the threading model in Flow's UI? Or Facebook, phpbb,
and
> so
> >> on, or whatever other site you were referring to that knitting
> grandmothers
> >> use? Can you really call not having any (user-visible) threading
model
> a
> >> threading model?
> >>
> >> From what I've seen of those types of discussions, people have to
> either
> >> explicitly refer back to whatever they're replying to (e.g. Twitter
> tries
> >> to, and doesn't very well from what I've seen), quote whatever
they're
> >> replying to (e.g. phpbb, email
(especially how Gmail renders it)),
> and/or
> >> just deal with having to dig through an undifferentiated pile of
> replies to
> >> find the ones that might be replying to the post they're interested
in
> >> (phpbb, Facebook).
> >
> > On a lot of sites they can also get away with a lack of threading
> because the discussions themselves are relatively inactive, where you
don't
> have multiple people jumping in and replying
to different points. Such
> inactivity isn't the case on many wikis, where discussion is more key to
> their functionality, and certainly shouldn't be an assumption here.
> >
>
> I still think that a threading and collapsing model as in
>
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/101962/google-maakt-leeftijdsrating-verplicht-vo…
> <
>
http://tweakers.net/nieuws/101962/google-maakt-leeftijdsrating-verplicht-vo…
> makes a lot more sense.
>
> It’s limited in width, readable, collapsible, has threading with
> indenting, has a maximum amount of indenting, and is a tech website
that is
also very
intensive, and all over the place.
DJ
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