Topic on User talk:Levivich/Flow

Levivich (talkcontribs)

You can watchlist a section??

Levivich (talkcontribs)

Why the hell don't we have this on enwiki? WhatamIdoing can you kindly point me to the relevant discussion?

WhatamIdoing (talkcontribs)

There were a lot of discussions, but this one was one of the last at enwiki. (One of the editors involved then went to a few more communities to ask them to demand the same treatment.)

Some of the reasons were basically valid: it's a big change in workflow, and why should I have to spend my precious time learning a new system? Some were pure misinformation. (There was a guy who insisted for months and months that it would be impossible to discussion math equations in Flow, and he didn't stop until someone stopped assuming that he was a reasonable person and basically said 'I saw math equations posted in Flow with my own eyes. Are you calling me a liar?') Quite a lot are problems that could be solved, if someone assigned a team to work on it for, say, five years. (That won't happen. Don't get your hopes up, even a little bit.)

I like parts of this system, and I dislike parts of this system. It may be better suited for Teahouses (see the Teahouse at the French Wikipedia) than for, say, the spam blacklist.

Despite its limitations, it's getting used. About 10,000 users have tried it (at some point) for their own user talk pages. By local community request, it's the default for all new talk namespaces on this wiki (any admin can turn it on/off for any given page).

What's always frustrating to me are long-time editors who have never used it, or even seen it, who think they know what they're talking about, usually because, years ago, they read a comment from the guy claiming that you can't do math in Flow, or that you can't edit other people's comments (you can, although here at mw.org, it's configured so that IPs can't change your comments). So when I see comments about it on enwiki, I sometimes ping people to a thread here. They don't all like it (that's perfectly valid), but at least they know what they're talking about.

BTW, the default editing system at this wiki is the visual mode. Use the pencil icon in the corner if you prefer typing in wikitext. (It'll remember the editor you used last time, and give that one to you next time.)


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