Thanks James. It would be nice if novice users who prefer VE for content pages didn't need to learn about wikimarkup for talk pages, or had a shallower learning curve. My understanding is that some wiki communities like Flow and others don't. For those that aren't using Flow, are there any improvements on the horizon for the editing of talk pages, particularly for novice users? For example, prompts or hints in the editing window regarding how to edit could be helpful for novice talk page editors (and novice wikimarkup editors on content pages as well).
Pine On Jun 25, 2016 08:16, "James Forrester" jforrester@wikimedia.org wrote:
On 23 June 2016 at 17:01, Pine W wiki.pine@gmail.com wrote:
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
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