User talk:Quiddity (WMF)/Archive 1

"I have studied many philosophers and many cats. The wisdom of cats is infinitely superior." - Hippolyte Taine

translatewiki:Thread:Support/The_time_phrase_in_Mediawiki_gadget_Echo
There's quite a lot of confusion about some time strings in Echo, I couldn't figure it out last time I checked it. Needs someone knowing the extension. Thanks, Nemo 00:16, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Thanks. I've added a link to it at w:Wikipedia_talk:Notifications and will poke the devs on Monday morning.
 * Note: I'm not officially working on Echo itself. I'm only busy at the related talkpages and bugs out of personal interest. :) –Quiddity (talk) 01:17, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
 * Right, I misremembered with which account you had asked that Echo question. Thanks! --Nemo 01:27, 18 November 2013 (UTC)
 * The devs say "Echo is utilizing mediawiki core getHumanTimestamp for timestamps", so that bug is almost certainly at the mediawiki core level. Hope that helps. Ping me here or IRC if it doesn't. :) –Quiddity (talk) 01:55, 19 November 2013 (UTC)
 * One bug is already filed in core, but it's not clear where the translations are (not) coming from. --Nemo 09:57, 19 November 2013 (UTC)

Contact point for community questions and feedback?
I'm from the editing community. I've looked at the current state of Flow and read all I could find. I have been looking around and I've been having trouble finding the best place to ask questions and provide feedback regarding Flow. Some of my feedback involves editor use cases, in particular I need to be able to include Wikitext. I see the Flow roadmap has zero support for wikitext until Q3. This means that the Flow-based pages are completely nonviable for discussing Flow. Could you link me to the best place for questions and feedback? Thanx. Alsee (talk) 07:02, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Hi Alsee, I'm from the editing community, too! (Editor since 2005.) I was only hired 1 year ago, as a community liaison. Hence the strange username.
 * Flow currently supports almost all wikitext (minus a few problems this week with math syntax, and ongoing work with categories). (Were you looking at the Flow, or somewhere else? There's a lot of outdated documentation, that I need to tag as historical soon... Please let me know where you found the outdated (or confusing?) information about wikitext-support. Thanks.)
 * You can see the existing user-tests, and join in with any testing of your own, at Talk:Sandbox.
 * The best place to provide feedback, is Talk:Flow. (There are regular discussions in various other places, too, which is frustrating but currently unavoidable. From Enwiki to mailing lists to Meta to IRC.)
 * Hope that helps. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:43, 3 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Based on someone's post elsewhere, either he or I have been very confused about the Flow plan. I had the impression that Flow was intended to eventually replace the current article talk pages, that Flow was intended to be the place we go to work on improving the article, and that "scratchpad" was what was going to allow us a shared edit space to support that work. The other user seems to have the impression that current Wikitext Talk pages would stay as an internally-facing page where we continue working on article the way we currently do, and that he thought Flow was intended to be an additional publicly facing chat board added to each article. He specifically mentioned how neo-Nazis show up to use wikinews Liquid threads to rant about news stories and to discus their neonazi ideas on Liquid while they ignore it and just use Talk for work.


 * I asked for a regular wikitext page and you gave me a flow link. If Flow is just intended to be a public chatboard we ignore, then I guess it doesn't matter if Flow doesn't support our needs for editing work. But if Flow *is* intended be our place for working on articles, then maybe it's for the best if I do post on the Flow board. If I post my example in Flow then the Flow team gets hit in the face with the reality of editing work and just how catastrophically Flow fails when editing work is posted there. I was trying to avoid doing that because it it will be painfully disruptive to anyone trying to use that board. Alsee (talk) 16:52, 4 September 2014 (UTC)
 * Flow is (eventually, and slowly, as it becomes more capable and welcomed) intended to replace all discussion pages. It does already work for discussing article content: See this test topic where I pasted the wikitext content from en:Monk. (The only change I made was to replace 4 instances of main with see also, as the translation tags at mediawiki's version of main were not displaying correctly (now filed as 70476)). Apart from some templates that don't exist on this wiki, everything displays as it should.
 * (The other person might have been thinking about the old Article feedback tool? but that is completely unrelated.)
 * Whilst there is an idea around developing a future "scratchpad" type module for inserting in Flow discussions (along with a few other fundamental modules, such as a !voting module), it won't be necessary for collaboration. -- Currently the discussion posts are configured to only allow the original author (and admins) to edit them, but there are plans to change that, because it is necessary that we all be able to help fix things and learn from each other - I believe they're just waiting on clearer designs for "someone other than the author edited this post", before changing it.
 * Hope that helps. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 05:32, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
 * I think we have different definitions of "works", chuckle. Just because something displays without technical error does not mean it is usable. You linked a nice out-of-the-way flow-test page, so I finally posted my example there. Warning, it's nasty. The table is mangled beyond recognition. Attempting to examine the full contents of that table would take around 40 mouse motions jumping between the browser vertical scroll bar and Flow's horizontal&vertical scroll bars. If you focus on individual rows, and work top to bottom, it would take literally hundreds of mouse actions. And assuming it were public-editable, trying to do any editing work would be atrocious. Here is the original table on a talk page. It's big and heavy, but the user interface is excellent. It displays identically to how it will display in the article, and there are three easy ways to view the entire contents: (1) a single slow drag of the browser scroll bar, or (2) a few single-clicks on the scroll bar to jump down page by page, or (3) a handful of taps of the PAGE_DOWN key to jump down page by page. Flow's "low density design" is a problem. Aside from wanting a "high density" discussion format (wider and less vertical waste), we need a full density work area that has full width. Something we can work in, without mangling that table.
 * Aaaah! I now see the roadmap is taking more note of density and has a dedicated discussion link! Yeay! But we still need support for a full width work area. I see another important improvement on Roadmap - the design reasoning had essentially said that complex discussions are more difficult to follow, therefore it is desirable for Flow to discourage or prevent complex discussions (i.e. it fails beyond three levels of reply & new replies at arbitrary depth). The roadmap takes more note of this problem, but lacks a discuss link. Alsee (talk) 08:14, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
 * You were initially asking about Wikitext support, hence the example I created was mostly to demonstrate technical support for that... ;-)
 * However, yeah, width... I'm personally still hoping for a userpreference or draggable-selector for width (or to make "Fixed-width" the optional toggle, and not the default). On a widescreen monitor, it's handy to have options, beyond just resizing my browser-window, and I do find the fixed-width much harder to use for skimming/scanning long pages. That aspect is still under discussion, as are all the items marked "experimental" in this table: Flow/FAQ (and more).
 * Mostly just to play en:Devil's advocate, I will point out that most wide tables have the same problem in small screens and tablets/mobile. Some even have horizontal scrollbars at 1024x768 or wider (eg en:List of English consorts and en:List of English monarchs. So whilst it is exacerbated in the current fixed width in Flow, it's not a unique problem there, and we do always need to keep the enormously wide variety of users in mind. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:51, 6 September 2014 (UTC)

just waiting on clearer designs for "someone other than the author edited this post", before changing it. Let the author tag it as editable, and just color-shade the top and bottom lines (where you have username reply)? It would be a good idea to set the post's user name equal to the last editor. That way the last editor takes all blame for whatever is currently in there :) Alsee (talk) 08:32, 6 September 2014 (UTC)
 * A) Possibly something like that? I'll pass along the suggestion to the designer.  B) Ha! :) Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 23:51, 6 September 2014 (UTC)