User:Isarra/zsdffhgf

Flow describes a project to make it easier for Wikipedians and other MediaWiki users to yell at each other.

Essentially it boils down to two things:

• A more structured and full-featured platform for talkpages following a discussion board model, with distinct threads and comments/posts
• A new fine-tunable and more useful watchlist interface, capable of consolidating page edits, Echo notifications and talkpage messages into a single encompassing but filterable feed

Talkpages

Users want to be able to talk to each other. First and foremost, whatever system they use, they want it to work - to do what they want, to not get in their way, and to get their message to the target. So long as this happens, they can be happy, not put too much thought into it, and spend more time working on whatever it is they work on.

Currently we have talkpages. These are otherwise ordinary pages used for talking. While they do work fairly well in most cases, they have their drawbacks, lacking potentially useful functionality and making them harder to use than they need to be - for new and old users alike.

For the new, it is primarily a learning curve - the notion of editing someone else's talkpage and comments, the strange new syntax to reply (indent) and sign, the lack of feedback about whether or not the other user will actually get the message, the lack of clarity where on the page to even put the response (after all, it does look something like email source, so maybe the response does go above the orignal post?). Many figure it out pretty quickly, either learning from examples of other folks' discussions already on the page, or with help from the local community, but others don't, at times not even seeing messages or replies sent to them or simply not venturing to try to talk themselves simply because the system seems so strange and daunting.

For the old, for those who have overcome initial learning curve, the problems are more subtle. Overall, talkpages are fairly simple and straight-forward at this point - new section or indent to reply, sign posts, make sure it's even on the right page, maybe poke the recipient on their own talkpage to be sure they see it. ...

Generally problems and/or difficulty are often associated with the following:

• Initial learning curve (most users figure it out eventually, but it is unintuitive and others have been outright driven off by how unfriendly the talkpage system seems)
• Complex discussions - it can be difficult to reply to the right person or sort through all the ::::s, especially if others have responded since the comment to which one wants to reply
• Edit conflicts - need to resolve the conflict, but perhaps the new comment(s) need addressing too, and then it is more likely to run into another edit conflict as a result...
• Multiple paragraphs/other unusual formatting in a reply (yes, you can do <p> or intermix colons and list items, but it gets messy - why should we have to deal with that?)
• Finding old discussions - searching for them, linking to them
• Archiving discussions - bots can resolve automation needs, but links still break, and searching archives can be difficult
• Watching discussions - no way to only watch a single thread on a high-activity page
• Checking for new replies - only ways with talkpages are to look at the entire thing and look for new bits (and potentially miss less apparent additions) or look at the diff of the page, which may not be of much use especially if other sections have been archived
• Inflexibility of the system - everything that is put down on the talkpage is essentially hardcoded. Changing the page is an option, but whatever people put down is down - if folks prefer not to thread a conversation, then it is down as not threaded regardless of whether or not others who come in later or want to read it would prefer it be threaded to them, and visa versa - if folks thread something and others would prefer to just read it in order of post, there is no easy way to do this. BUCKETS SELF FIX THIS
• Lack of metadata - no quick way to get a summary of a discussion (who started it, how long it's going, how many folks are even involved or is it just an argument between two users going nowhere, etc)

If properly implemented, a structured discussion system would be able to resolve all of these annoyances while largely maintaining the useful features and workflows that users currently enjoy with talkpages.

Other things

Stuff.