Thread:Talk:Flow Portal/Warning levels detection/reply (23)

> Can you give an example of a non-threaded discussion at the English Wikipedia?

Why should I do that? The problem with Flow is that English Wikipedia talk pages are used for collaborative tasks that are not "discussions" at all, threaded or otherwise, and the current proposed design includes little or no support for them.

I'm talking about user-created classification silos and review backlogs such as those typically created by Wikiprojects (tables of discussions requiring attention, various newsletters and other tools that get posted to talk pages, or tools like the AfD voting statistics), that typically depend on transcluding tables and other rich formatted data that don't fit a "threaded discussion" model.

There is some talk about allowing sticky shared notes and an "unstructured" section, but those are poorly defined lacking use cases and features; and given the amount of features from wikitext that are being dropped in Flow, it's likely that the current tools will cease working, and it's not at all clear that they can be adapted to the new paradigm that is not designed to support them.

All this wouldn't be a problem if Flow was not intended as a complete replacement for talk pages, and therefore imposing a design that only supports threaded discussions for a collaboration tool that is used for other communication models. Solving it would be as easy as associating each talk page or thread with a free-form sandbox supporting the same content that can be displayed at articles.

P.S. Watching this thread below it looks like some options are being considered to support this kind of free-form collaboration tools that are not threaded.