On Sat, Sep 6, 2014 at 2:14 PM, Romaine Wiki <romaine.wiki(a)gmail.com> wrote:
I am an admin on Commons, and I regularly have to
remove an image on a talk
page because it is for example a violation of copyright. I see no way to
remove the copyright violation from the message.
Another thing I tried is the removal of a personal attack or a privacy
issue. It is common on nl-wiki to remove a personal attack out of a message
and replacing it by a template which says what happened. This is impossible
to do.
Please see my response to Todd here explaining the current permissioning:
https://lists.wikimedia.org/pipermail/wikimedia-l/2014-September/074358.html
If a template is changed, its parameters on the
various places where the
template is added need to be changed as well. This is done by hand or with
a bot (like AWB), both ways seems impossible with flow.
Flow doesn't automatically update template output -- it retains the
output as it was when the user posted the comment. We can argue
whether that's good or bad behavior, but it's worth doing so in the
context of real examples. When would this cause problems?
Contrary to some descriptions, it's not quite the same as {{subst}}ing
the template. You can still get back to the wikitext used produce the
output, and change it, and potentially re-parse it. It just doesn't do
so automatically (which is also not an inherent limitation).
If someone added a message to the wrong page, it is
relocated to another
talk page. Seems impossible to do here. If a message is considered to be
inappropriate for a certain page, it is relocated, seems impossible with
Flow.
It doesn't support any kind of moving yet, that's still (like many
features) to be developed, but unlike talk pages, it's architecturally
viable to move a whole thread and its history, rather than copying and
pasting content around, losing history, as we currently do routinely.
Another thing I noticed is that I can't get a
complete overview of all
messages added to a certain talk page. After 10 messages, everything is
hidden. A quick ctrl + F is impossible. When I know there was a discussion
about a specific thing, I want to check the talk page easily by searching
it completely, not possible. It is very annoying that I can't get a
complete overview of all messages on a talk page, this is a basic need!
Of course, which is why it's a high priority feature.
To answer the question, To Flow or not to Flow, it
does not flow. I am not
able to do simple edits which are done every day.
It's a system in early development, and has never been advertised as
anything else. To draw conclusions about what it can and cannot do is,
by definition, premature. A much more useful discussion is whether a
system like it (provided some of its properties are clarified and
improved) is desirable, and if not, what alternative ways there are to
make talk pages more user-friendly, and what the limitations of those
methods are. Also, to the extent that there are aspects of the Flow
architecture that really are dealbreakers, we should fix them now.
As I wrote to Risker, I think it's worth considering spending some
development time on turning something like the Teahouse gadget (which
allows one click insertion of replies on the Teahouse Q/A page) into a
Beta Feature after some further improvement, to see just how useful it
could be for the common case. If there's an 80/20 rule and in 20% of
cases it just gives up and edits the section, that might still be a
time-saver and convenience. There might even be other relevant gadgets
already in some languages/projects -- worth a closer look, for sure.
Flow is a long term bet that an architecture of tructured comments
will ultimately have fewer hard and fast limitations on how
collaboration in wikis can work, and will accrue usability benefits
very quickly (as it already has done, like faster posting and replies)
due to its architecture. So far we've only invested in the long term
bet -- some rebalancing of effort towards the short term may be
valuable, and may lead to interim milestones that impact users today
rather than years from now. I can't answer when you'd hit the
boundaries of what you can do with the free form text on talk pages
today, but I don't think anyone's really tried yet. (Magnus, I am
sending brain waves in your direction! ;-)
Erik
--
Erik Möller
VP of Engineering and Product Development, Wikimedia Foundation