On 23 June 2016 at 17:01, Pine W <wiki.pine(a)gmail.com> wrote:
1. Is Flow feature development still frozen? If and
when would Flow feature
development resume?
Yes, principal development is frozen. Like with all production software,
urgent bugs and maintenance are still worked on, and we might add some
minor features.
We've not re-prioritised the Collaboration team's work on Flow, and we
won't do so very soon; the team this coming year are working on improving
the edit review process
<https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Edit_Review_Improvements> and the
notifications system. However, after that work is done there are some
often-requested areas for improvement in Flow which the team plan to
improve. For example, I know that the fixed threading of discussions is
irritating to some, and the lack of search is a serious issue. I know that
the use of Flow for individuals' talk pages as a Beta Feature on several
wikis has been quite popular, and given us a lot of feedback on how we can
do better. I look forward to discussing those priorities with everyone
nearer the time.
2. Will VE be enabled on talk pages?
No. This comes up quite often. VE is designed to edit content. Talk pages
aren't content. Many of the tools and design patterns that make VE nice to
use to edit content make it poor to use for discussions. To make it usable
for discussions, we would have to remove or break many of those patterns in
VE. We have spent a lot of time researching with users what works best
there. I do not think we will make writing reference materials easier,
simpler and faster by compromising on that.
3. Is work planned to improve the Wikitext editor, or will that happen only
> in the context of integrating it into VE?
Not really. The work on improving wikitext editing is mostly around the
wikitext mode inside the visual editor. The department is also working more
widely on improvements to wikitext itself (like supporting the
TemplateStyles work, providing balanced templates, and replacing Tidy with
a modern parser), but they won't have a big impact on the existing
WikiEditor software.
Thanks for your questions. Happy to answer more. :-)
J.
--
James D. Forrester
Lead Product Manager, Editing
Wikimedia Foundation, Inc.
jforrester(a)wikimedia.org | @jdforrester