Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions

I included this paragraph in the Mission part of the Flow page here, as it seems to be one of the main reasons for it:

;We don't want to be bothered with improving Wikitext, that's not sexy enough.

Most of the things we pretend to be possible only with Flow could as well be done with regular discussion pages, but we had to listen to the communities if we did that, and we had to make improvements to an existing and very productive system, that's simply not sexy enough for all of us programmers here at the WMF. Developing something new from scratch, and ditch the communities, is much more fun.

It was reversed as being an insult and an impersonation. OK, it was kind of an impersonation, as the devs didn't state it explicitly, it's just emanating from most discussions about Flow. Whether this for people outside the ivory tower of SF seemingly accurate observation is an insult, I can't say, I think it definitely looks like it's true.

IMHO extensions such as this one (as limited as it currently is) are a great way to fix what is wrong with the communities you speak of. And the most important problem is that they are shrinking. Some faster, some at a slightly slower pace, but still.

If we don't do something about how sexy Wiki editing is, we'll end up in the same club of 1000 nerds from all around the world who don't mind learning the HTML-inspired wiki markup and who bark at newbies just because they expect something easier to use. The same was true to visual editor: most Wikipedians out there criticised it because they do not need it - completely missing the point that we need new people in the project.

But perhaps it's just me.

Can you articulate "what is wrong with the communities" discussed here? Personally, I haven't run into anything particularly "wrong" with the EN WIKT community. It isn't huge, sure, but then it never has been, at least for the years I've been involved (some activity in the first half of 2006, then a hiatus until end-2010, participating off-and-on since then).

If what is wrong is not clearly defined, we have no objective measurement for discussing how effective Flow is at "fixing" anything. All we have is our subjective reactions to our experiences using Flow.

About "shrinking" communities, I myself have participated much less in the EN Wikipedia over the years, in large part because it's mostly done -- any of the articles that I might think of to write, have already been written. Maintenance is much less interesting, and requires fewer people. A shrinking editor base at this point is not a problem to solve, and is instead both expected and inevitable. This is part of the natural progression of any encyclopedia project: once the articles are written, you don't need lots of editors anymore, beyond a relatively smaller group to maintain and update existing material. This latter group also often requires a different set of skills and interests than the group who writes the articles initially.

I fear that Flow is a response to the latter issue (i.e. developers have grown bored with maintenance and are coming up with solutions in search of problems).

Back on topic, your post suggests that one of the things you think is "wrong" is that we have a shrinking editor base, and that "we need new people in the project". Can you explain why? And can you explain any other issues that are "wrong", that Flow might somehow fix?

Wiki markup will stay for really long, or something equally flexible and "nerdy" will have to be a follow up on the real pages. Whether they could be edited by some wysiwyg-editor or with the current one is is secondary.

The good thing now is, that all pages behave in the same manner, so you can test and ask on the talk pages, that have exactly the same behaviour as the article pages. With Flow they will get completely disconnected in the look and feel. Nothing to test on this forumesque thingy for the main page, just alleged easy-to-use Q'n'A.

Yes, there are parts on the talk pages, where such behaviour could be OK, so it would perhaps be OK to implement something on the talk pages, an add-on, to include such forum-type sections in the talk page. Whether that's LQT, Flow or whatever, as long as the main talk page stays exactly the same as everything else in the wikiverse, and such extremely easy to use.

Can you somehow show how the behavioural problem of the communities could be resolved with some new gadget, that's extreme restricted, not flexible at all, absolutely unconnected to the rest of the pages, just a useless, popped-on forum-thingy?

The problems of the shrinking editor numbers have nothing to do with the quite easy to fathom behaviour of the software, but with the quite hard to fathom behaviour of the community using this software. If you want to improve the numbers of editors, the last thing you you should look at is the software, that's next to completely irrelevant.

Of course that's nothing the hordes of programmers living from our donations can do that good, more professional community relation management should be employed, and the programmers should first of all maintain and improve the existing, really well working, infrastructure. But as I said: It doesn't seem to be sexy enough for those living from our donations to do such menial tasks like maintenance and evolutionatry improvement.

Guys, you're of course right that there are many fields where there is little to add to the articles we already have. But the scope of Wikipedia is to cover all human knowledge, not just the articles one might expect to find in, say, Britanica. And there's plenty of articles even the en Wikipedia is missing. Take a look at biographic articles. We have all the important English-language writers and actors covered. But what about Polish scientists? Notable Hungarian linguists? Indian entrepreneurs? The list of missing articles is really long, I believe it's actually longer than what we already have. Especially that our goal is not just to have stubs on all the notable people or places in the English speaking world. To keep the project running we really need more people. Besides, do you remember content disputes back in the days when 100+ people took part in them? Nowadays it's mostly two or three people. It's really harder to achieve NPOV when there's only two people arguing.

Having said that, I believe our editor base is shrinking too fast and that Wikipedia is collapsing under its own weight. Sure, Wikipedia grognards like myself (11 years and counting) have no trouble with mediawiki software (or html for that matter), have no problem with using all the fancy abbreviations we all know and love, have no problem whatsoever with how unfriendly Wikipedia's design is (as it's not unfriendly to us). We learned how to live with it and many of us expect no changes at all. However, from my experience as a Wikipedia workshop organiser I can tell that we need changes. Back in the days when I joined, an average internet user was way more code-literate than today. You had to know more in order to use internet at all. Nowadays people got used to Web 2.0, web 3.0, wysiwyg interfaces and whatnot. Younger people, those who could replace all the Wikipedians we've lost over the years, don't even know html ever existed.

So, how effective Flow is at making talk pages friendlier to newbies? I don't know. But I believe that it makes them more natural to people who did not start using the Internet back in the old BBS days. And it makes using talk pages easier to use for newbies - and that's already something. Sure, you're all right that behaviour of what is left of our community is another problem that needs to be solved, but no technical innovation can change that. Is it possible to do any evolutionary improvement on what is basically a HTML add-on? I don't think so.

All in all, I believe this is definitely a step in an interesting direction. Whether good or bad - I don't know. But I'm happy that someone's trying.

Couldn't agree more with this. MediaWiki certainly needs to enter the Web 2.0 age. I co-maintain RepRap wiki and a lack of people comfortable with MediaWiki's oddities is more than apparent. For example: there's no "New Page" button! People simply don't understand this and no amount of explanations can make them feel comfortable. I already went as far as researching other software packages for replacing MediaWiki just because MediaWiki works fine, but in so unexpected ways.

Back to Flow here, this looks like a quantum leap for discussion pages. Excellent! Imagine that: no longer missing signatures (which 99% of occasional users don't even know it exists)! I'll look on how to get this into our wiki. As is, I see no apparent missing features.

Well, one thing: putting discussions at the bottom of the article page whould be much better. A Discussion/Talk tab isn't expected for most contributors, so people don't even watch out for it.

P.S.: if you want to know what I mean, look at Thingiverse. Neglibile feature set, but trivial to edit and accordingly, extremely popular. They started 3 years ago, long after RepRap wiki, and have about a 100 times more users by now.

"But the scope of Wikipedia is to cover all human knowledge, not just the articles one might expect to find in, say, Britanica."

I agree. Our mission is to cover the "sum of all human knowledge", not the "sum of knowledge that's frequently written about by Europeans and North Americans" (I'm exaggerating somewhat of course, but there is a serious systemic bias on English Wikipedia).

We still have a lot of stuff to cover. Click https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Special:Random , https://zh.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random or https://hi.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random , or or whatever, and you will quickly find articles English Wikipedia is missing, a large number of which fit English Wikipedia's notability conventions.

There are also many notable topics that are on no Wikipedia, or hardly any.

Wikipedia is not mostly done (neither English Wikipedia nor any other language Wikipedias). Further, we need new people to help expand it and improve them.

@Eirikr, Sänger S.G: - just checking if it works :)

There are some minor technical adjustments to make for better usability of the talk pages for the newbies without any grasp of the internet, that are only capable of using wysiwyg interfaces and think that's all:

• The "Edit" button could be more prominent (that's opposite to what's been done with the MV, a pure viewing thingy, that make editing more difficult)
• Maybe VE could be used more, I just don't know whether it's yet really ready for use in the wild, and doesn't wreak havoc on complicated pages as it did on the last release. For me it's definitely not helpful yet, far too complicated.
• Autosign new posts on talk pages. Should be easy for the hordes of programmers paid by our donations over in SF. If they could deign to serve the community and not their vanity.
• Indentations could be automated as well methinks, with the same personnel, if their time would not be wasted on stuff like this forum impersonation.

But all this will not help in any way the behavioural problems with editors, and it will especially bring hordes of trolls to controversial articles, even more than now, that the current editors and admins will have to keep at bay. I think it will make the atmosphere even more toxic, if the real newbies will drown in an onslaught of trolls and SPAs.

@Sänger S.G: As to your points:

1. Sure, a good idea
2. Agree with you again. I guess established editors won't need VE anyway, we just got used to wikicode and we're fine with it but I'm all for developing VE more. It's getting better with every change BTW
3. Automatic signing could be a nice idea, but what if you edit your comment to correct a typo? Would such edits also be automagically signed? Anyway, why not :)
4. Again, another nice idea.

You're right that no technical solution could solve the problem of unfriendly people or established editors biting the newbies. But then again, the Flow is not about educating the community, is it. And I would really love it if hordes of trolls actually bothered to stop by. :) Seriously, I really miss the times when content disputes often reached the boiling point - because it meant that there were enough people who actually cared. Sure, trolls, nationalists, POV-pushers and all that happy bunch are a pain in the back. But we've learned to deal with them and we have methods of stopping them if they get too hot. OTOH back in the good ol' times of huge community we often overlooked their positive input. Nowadays even the Lithuanian nationalists stopped editing English Wikipedia. Which means w:Talk:Vilnius is a safer place, but it also means they stopped adding articles on all those weird 19th century Lithuanian printers, tiny hamlets in Samogitia or modern Lithuanian volleyball players. And we could really use more of those. If allowing more trolls or trigger-happy teens into the project is the price we'd have to pay for more articles - I'm all for it.