On Sat, Sep 6, 2014 at 2:14 PM, Romaine Wiki romaine.wiki@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