Topic on Talk:Flow/Interactive prototype

I liked it a lot - here's why

6
Hannibal (talkcontribs)

Some of the previous comments have mentioned that the majority of the comments have been critical of Flow. I, however, like it a lot. Perhaps it's because I tried to follow along with the development of Flow and with Jorm's thoughts on this and other subjects, but there are also other reasons:

  • I much prefer that you won't have to click "edit" to start editing but simply place the cursor in the right place and start typing
  • after clicking "save", Flow seems to work the way most normal systems do, with not reloading the page and you having to scroll down to the right place, but rather stay on the right comment
  • I think the thing about not having to sign your comments is long overdue and will significantly improve life on the wikis I am active on. On Swedish Wikipedia our Report an error page, and newcomers' talk pages are full with comments about their forgetting to sign
  • it seems to be very much easier to teach to new editors; something that I do a lot
  • automatic indentation is one of the good things about Liquid Threads, and it is good to see it included here. So many people get it wrong in the present wikitext system
  • the "unsubscribe from topic" and other topic choices make Flow look like something that I want to work with. There are so many topics that start out promising but then go on forever, and these type of choices make that easier to deal with, rather than having to unwatch the whole talk page/Wikipedia page
  • the left hand arrow that allows you to minimize or maximize a topic is better than what we have now, where you can scroll through the same things over and over (I trust that the choice for the topic will be remembered?)
  • the "working" image (the W logo being drawn) is beautiful
  • I like being able to mark pages as read. Not enough systems have that option
  • the box with the profile page, archived talk, etc is very good to have on top, instead of to the left. It make those tools easier to find

To couter some of the criticism about Flow taking too much space for each comment, I don't really think that is going to be an issue. I've seen Jorm working and I am confident that this is something he will work on, and get others to help. Perhaps a system with the user name to the left and the comment to the right.

I would ask for a way to "favorite" a topic, to keep it near the top of the page.

All in all, an improvement that I look forward to seeing deployed. Thanks for your work.

Quiddity (talkcontribs)

That's great feedback (clearly explained, well-separated, and positive!), and an interesting suggestion. Thanks! More suggestions would be welcome.

Jorm (WMF) (talkcontribs)

Thank you so much for this feedback. As Quiddity says, it is very good and well-explained.

Regarding your suggestion about each topic remembering its closed or open state, I would love to do that, but there may be technical limitations that prevent it. It's a lot of data to process and store. I know how we would do it (it would be another field in your "subscription" to the topic) but there may be issues with remembering state on topics you aren't subscribed to (which would create a weird and inconsistent user experience). However, I'll look into it and talk to our software guys about it.

Joe Decker (talkcontribs)

This is largely just a "me too" on Hannibal's comments. All of this is going to come with some points of friction--to pick an example, I've poked folks on every side of this discussion about the impedence-mismatch that's going to come from AfC drafts currently living on talk pages--but I think the cost of the change will be amply repaid by how much nicer an environment this will be for discussion.

Arthur Rubin (talkcontribs)

AfC just needs to be moved to another namespace to keep it away from Flow; it's not, and not intended to be, suitable for the concept of Flow.

That being said, the prototype would be suitable for an additional place for Wikipedia discussions. In my opinion, and that of all en.Wikipedia editors who have expressed an opinion at w:WT:Flow, as that it, as presently conceived, is not suitable for a complete replacement of user talk pages, and cannot be made into a replacement for article talk pages without undoing much of what is presently proposed.

ImperfectlyInformed (talkcontribs)

It's nice to counter some of the negative feedback, but we should also try really hard to think of suggestions for improvement. I agree that the prototype has many significant improvements and I'm glad that you highlighted the space issue as an area to improve. Hopefully Jorm does take that seriously as you suggest. It feels somehow very crowded partly due to the margins and large font. A minimalist version for those who have sharp eyesight and want to take in a lot of information quickly would be nice. I also agree with many of the other comments on this page (e.g., source editing for convenient wikilinking and stuff).

The floating "start new discussion" box is distracting and takes up a ton of space, making it a negative. There's tons of empty space to the right where you could float some sort of menu with various options, including even a table of contents which could be helpful. If I want to start a new discussion I'll have figured that out when I land on the page. Notably, the prototype squeezes the text into a fixed-width div of 798 pixels (at least on my laptop) whereas the status quo is a fluid div which generally ends up being significantly wider in general for me. I believe some research suggests that short widths are easier to read, but it comes at the expense of more scrolling. The empty space on the right could also be used, although I really like the idea of being able to minimize things if you're in the minimalist mood, which I often am.

I have a little trouble understanding how this is all going to fit together based on this prototype. Is there going to be any actual test server, where we can play and it will save? It seems that there's generally been a reluctance to let editors test in a test environment, which I don't understand.

On the higher-level, the tagging will be nice although details are scarce (Talk:Flow_Portal#Thread_tags_27816 and Flow_Portal/Architecture#Tags) - it's not clear that the tags discussed in Flow_Portal/Use_cases#Talk_namespace are the same. There should also be more readily-available ways to list pages which are having a lot of discussion and I imagine the feed will allow you to select which tags to follow, which could reduce siloing and could help editors meet other people in the more informal space of talkpages. Often a user talkpage discussion will actually be related to a discussion on an article talkpage or an ANI talk, and tagging or linking these could help show the totality of the discussion.

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