On 19 Mar 2015 7:55 am, "Brad Jorsch
(Anomie)" <bjorsch(a)wikimedia.org>
wrote:
On Wed, Mar 18, 2015 at 9:42 PM, Danny Horn <dhorn(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
> Brad: unfortunately, it's really hard to tell very much from a
conversation
> with messages like "3: Post C: reply to
Post A". You could do that with
the
old
model, the new model or the perfect magic Nobel-Prize-winning
discussion threading still to be discovered, and it would probably look
like nonsense in all three.
I shouldn't have used both numbers and post-names, but once I realized
that
it was already a bit late and it won't let me
edit those posts. Someone
with appropriate permissions is free to go back and edit them all to
remove
the number prefix and let the alphabetical order
of the post-names
suffice
to indicate the chronological order of the
postings, if that would make
it
less confusing for you.
The point is the structure you're displaying doesn't make any sense, not
that the content of my messages isn't anything that might make sense on
its
own. My "content" is explicitly
simplified to illustrate the failings in
the displayed structure. Structure should *facilitate* understanding, but
in your demo I'd find that understanding the underlying structure of the
conversation would be *despite* the broken display-structure.
Nor is the point that people can screw up wikitext talk pages in ways
that
are even more confusing. That's a given, but
Flow is supposed to do
better.
Right now it's worse than a well-formatted
wikitext talk page (which has
the advantage that human users can *fix* the structure when a newbie
breaks
it).
Comparing
http://flow-tests.wmflabs.org/wiki/Wikitext version of
Topic:Sdrqdcffddyz0jeo to
http://flow-tests.wmflabs.org/wiki/Wikitext_version_of_Topic:Sdrqdcffddyz0j…
,
I find it much easier in the latter to see what
is a reply to what.
> We've tried in our testing to pretend that we're having real
conversations,
> so we could see whether there's any
logical way to get to eight levels
of
nested
threading. It's not easy to organize make-believe conversations,
but if you want to start a thread, I'd be happy to fire up a few
sockpuppets and pretend to talk about something with you.
No thanks. Pretend "real" conversations are ok for a first assessment at
usability, but by nature they're likely to be vapid and unlikely to have
the inter-post complexity of actual conversations on-wiki where people
are
concentrating on actually communicating rather
than on forcing a
conversation for the sake of testing.
Let's all be happy then that we are replacing an unloved broken talk
extension with Flow on a wiki where we have real conversations then ...? :)
actually dogfooding will make it much easier for us to communicate errors
with the Flow team and help improve the software.
I truly hope that soon we can get to a point where we can enable flow on
all pages on
mediawiki.org and this seems like the obvious first step.
The dogfooding has been happening for a while on WMF's own office-wiki. We
haven't heard any results about that. Is the system being used more than
the wikitext system? (i.e., are there more "talk page" comments now than
there were before?) Have users expressed satisfaction/dissatisfaction with
the system? Have they been surveyed? Do they break down into groups
(e.g., engineering loves it, grants hates it, etc...)? I hear some stories
(including stories that suggest some groups of staff have pretty much
abandoned talk pages on office-wiki and are now reverting to emails
instead) but without any documentary evidence or analysis it's unreasonable
to think that it is either a net positive OR a net negative.
Risker/Anne