Hoi, There are two ways to look at the talk systems. It served us so far to some extend. It has been considered in need of replacement for a long time and consequently we have systems like Liquid Threads that are arguably at least as good in many use cases and fail in others.
The other way to look at tit is to see it fail on what is becoming increasingly the platform of our readers and our new editors; the mobile and the tablet. On those platforms talk pages are a disaster, an utter failure. This realisation that these types of devices are our future make it imperative to move away from our talk pages as soon as possible.
We do not have the time to procrastinate and we do not have time for continued deliberations of how nice it would be if we could do it all over again. As it is, we have a team of developers working on Flow. They are committed to consider the many use cases that exist in our community but in the end, fixing those will increasingly become an exercise in diminishing returns given the need to support our readers and editors on mobiles and tablets. The cost is not in the time of the development team, it is not in functionality we really want it is in supporting the growing percentage of people that do NOT use computers.
The question to ask is: who do we do it for, Thanks, GerardM
On 8 September 2014 06:13, Risker risker.wp@gmail.com wrote:
On 7 September 2014 23:54, 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?
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.
-- Marc
I suppose the question really is, has it failed? On what basis are we saying that our current discussion system is unusable?
Simply put, I'd suggest that the problem isn't the system, it's the discussion process itself that has points of failure. The replacement of actual discussion with templates is a point of failure, and that will not be improved by a change in the platform if all that happens is we use basically the same templates to have the same non-discussions. Nothing in the technology, either document-based or open-ended, will change the nature of the discourse itself; rude people will still be rude, erudite people will still be erudite, and none of will change the snark on Jimbo Wales's talk page. A significant percentage of Wikimedians rarely use talk pages at all (and a goodly number of those identify as exopedians), but no evidence that the percentage of Wikimedians who eschew social interaction has changed significantly, or that those with a low level of contribution to discussion space are doing so because they find the *technology* unappealing.
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