On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 1:54 PM, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 09/07/2014 01:57 AM, Diego Moya wrote:
a major property of a document-centric architecture that is lost in a structured one is that it's open-ended, which means that end users can build new features and flows on top of it, without the need to request the platform developers to build support for them (sometimes even without writing new software at all; new workflows can be designed and maintained purely through social convention).
And yet, after over a decade of open-ended design through social convention, the end result is... our current talk pages. Perhaps another decade or two will be needed before that document-centric architecture gives us a half-decent discussion system?
Or maybe it will take a decade to deliver a discussion-centric system that meets the needs of our community to replace the document-centric discussion system we currently have.
Sorry if that sound snarky, but I have difficulty buying an argument that the current system has the potential to suffice when it has demonstrably already failed. It does no good to have the hypothetical capacity for a good system if, in practice, it's unusable.
While it may not be everybody's dream system, talk pages are quite usable, as demonstrated by a lot of people using them every single day.
I am all for the addition of a discussion system, effectively the next iteration of Liquid Threads, but it worries me to see the *deployment* objectives are already articulated in annual plans to be complete replacement of all talk pages in 2015.
This potential problematic deploy could be very easily de-escalated by a WMF decision that Flow will not be forcibly deployed onto an unwilling project, and can be deployed per-page. If it is good software, the projects will *ask* for it to be deployed, like they did with LiquidThreads, and users will want to use it on their user talk even if the wider community isnt ready to migrate. e.g. once it is beta quality, I am sure Jimmy Wales will want it enabled on his user talk page, which would increase exposure to, and acceptance of, Flow.