Hoi,
I have used LiquidThreads and the current talk pages for too long. I prefer
LiquidThreads ANY day warts and all over the talk pages.
Ok this discussion is about automated discussion environments and lets keep
to that subject. As you may know,
uses LQT. It is
therefore quite a good environment for learning about the use of Flow. It
is truly multi-lingual; by definition. It eats its own dog food; it is
where the localisation of Flow and any other MediaWiki software happens.
Conversion software is being developed and it will be great when it and
flow is at the stage where it can bring Flow to
. One
additional benefit is that the twn community and people like Siebrand are
well able and fearless. When they have issues they will be precise, topical
and in a language that will be understood by the developers of Flow.
When twn is happy using flow, you can be sure that technically it suffices
and that it did get proper attention from the perspectives of all the
languages that are actively maintained.
Thanks,
GerardM
On 5 September 2014 23:43, Tim Davenport <shoehutch(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I really don't like the way that people are
referring to Flow as a done
deal with an inevitable roll out. Nothing remotely close to workable
software has been produced, no case has been made that the purported
problems being addressed by this top-down software project are valid issues
in the community, the range of unintended effects that will be cause by the
mass archiving of talk pages and move to a new "flashy" system hasn't been
properly assessed.
With Visual Editor, there was a clear need for WYSIWYG capabilities —
although the software rolled out was grossly inadequate and the roll out
process hamhanded (not to say incompetent). With Media Viewer, at least
there is a clear benefit to a certain percentage of WP readers to offset
the inconveniences resulting from mildly inadequate software. With Flow we
are looking at the potential of grossly inadequate software with no
apparent "saving graces" other than the fact that the old software is old
and the new software will be new and that things will look nice.
If this is done wrong, it will be a catastrophe for WMF far bigger than
what happened with VE.
Wil Sinclair, an enthusiast for the LiquidThreads/Flow mechanism for talk
pages, is in an excellent position to give us some A/B numbers for
participation at his site, with in without LiquidThreads being imposed from
above.
How did that work out with participation levels at the OffWiki site, Mr.
Sinclair?
How many very active editors has the convenient LiquidThreads mechanism
generated for your site?
How many edits have taken place in the month after LiquidThreads was
installed over "community" objections versus the month before it was
installed?
Has the clean up process been easy reconverting to MediaWiki without the
LiquidThreads extension?
Bottom line: OffWiki site participation was blown up by a unilateral move
to LiquidThreads by the "tech department."
Observe and learn.
Tim Davenport
Carrite on WP /// Randy from Boise on WPO
Corvallis, OR
=======
Wil Sinclair wrote:
>This somewhat circuitously brings us back to
the subject. We have a
chance to rollout Flow the right way. There are some
questions that
come to mind that might tell us if we're headed for a big win or a
bigger debacle:
>1) Is the WMF working with the community as
closely and substantially
as possible to make sure Flow is ready for primetime?
>2) Is the community preparing itself for a
major change, not only in
interface, but to some degree in wiki-philosophy about
how discussions
are conducted- not to mention the notion that, while wiki software can
do almost anything involving asynchronous online communication, it
can't do everything as well as other interfaces?
>I think Flow will be particularly challenging.
I deployed Liquid
Threads on another site. I liked the threaded interface, as did
others. But overall it was roundly rejected because it was harder to
search (I only found out you have to add the namespace to the
searchable namespace in LocalSettings.php later), and it invasively
took over all discussion pages, among other headache. Problems like
these could easily be addressed before a rollout, but they should be
addressed as early as possible. It is notable, however, that the more
our users used it, the more they seemed to like it.
>What can we do to make the Flow rollout as
smooth as starting '''now'''?
,Wil
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