+1 Dan's "team bandwidth" comment.
I totally want to implement native interfaces for all of the fundamentals central to
editing which Dmitry listed, but we'll just need to plan and stage things very
deliberately.
If we eventually do commit to this, we may even consider keeping all of these fundamental
editing interfaces "beta only" until all parts are working and working well
together - even if this takes a while.
On Jul 24, 2015, at 7:38 PM, Dan Garry
<dgarry(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
On 22 July 2015 at 10:52, Dmitry Brant
<dbrant(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Therefore, providing access to talk pages without providing the other fundamentals that
are central to editing (moderation tools, watchlists, diffs, notifications, etc) may be
putting the cart before the horse, and may lead to confusion.
I think you hit the nail on the head with this comment.
Experienced Wikipedians know the value of talk pages. For many of them, talk pages
actually comprise the majority of their usage of the site. But, the majority of their
navigation to those pages are through their watchlist, so adding a talk page link
doesn't serve them; they know the talk page is there, and how to find it if they need
it.
For newer users, talk pages are their entry point into the inner workings of the wiki,
and how they get sucked in. But, there are some pretty fundamental formatting issues with
talk pages in the app right now. If you're going to make it read only, how are you
going to explain to users why other users are leaving comments, but they can't edit
it? Suddenly, there are a lot of questions that will take a lot of team bandwidth,
designs, and discussions to answer. Can you commit to answering all of these questions
given the other work you have in the pipeline?
For the reasons above, I was opposed (and still am) to adding links to talk pages in the
app. For experienced editors, they know where to find them and don't need a button to
get there. For readers (the primary user type that the app supports), the talk page
experience in the app is not good enough to expose the users to it, and we never had the
capacity to get the experience to a place where it was good enough for them without
considerable work to build out the entire pipeline.
Dan
--
Dan Garry
Lead Product Manager, Discovery
Wikimedia Foundation
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