Topic on User talk:Levivich/Flow

Testing

15
Summary by Levivich

Test of summarize

Levivich (talkcontribs)

OP Test edit 1

Levivich (talkcontribs)

Reply 1 to OP

Levivich (talkcontribs)

Response 1.1 to Reply 1

WhatamIdoing (talkcontribs)

The dev team never got far enough to decide what the proper indentation level was, or anything like that. BTW, trying typing the @ symbol. If you're in visual mode, it'll offer to look up the name of anyone you'd like to have join this conversation.

Levivich (talkcontribs)

@WhatamIdoing Yeah, the mention function is just one of many industry-standard features missing at enwiki... I know you said don't get your hopes up but I have to ask... you said five years. Was that an exaggeration? Why so long? Strikes me as needing months but not years of further development.

WhatamIdoing (talkcontribs)

There's a lot that needs to be done to make it do what we (you and volunteer-me) really want. The codebase is old enough that most of it would have to be re-written because of w:en:software rot. Some original choices are doubtful (e.g., the database is recording our the comments in HTML+RDFa rather than wikitext) and would probably be reversed. That's probably a year's work (maybe more) by itself, and we haven't actually improved anything from the POV of the user yet.

There are several bugs about proper integration into MediaWiki (e.g., to make it possible to oversight a single comment rather than whole threads). If you want it to work for high-volume editors, then watchlist integration needs to change. The way this appears in Echo wasn't meant to be the main system, and just imagine what the notifications would look like if you have thousands of pages on your watchlist. (And lots of us do: https://discuss-space.wmflabs.org/t/how-many-pages-are-on-your-watchlist-right-now/3129 ) I start every morning at https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia_talk:WikiProject_Medicine&action=history so I can see what happened since yesterday. I can quickly scan the diff of every change since my last visit. That's not possible in Flow. It's supposed to be, but the PM de-prioritized that. (He's since apologized very nicely for that decision.)

So stuff like that would take another year or two, and then we might be able to get into the actually interesting parts. Imagine that Commons' deletion discussions happen "at" Commons and at whichever wikis are using the file. Imagine that when editors want to have a vote (e.g., at RFA and ArbCom), they could actually just have a vote. We'd end up with something awesome, but that's another couple of years' work, plus time to teach the tech volunteers how to set the thing up to do the things they want at each wiki.

If you're interested in reading more, then I'll recommend reading Talk pages consultation 2019/Discussion tools in the past and w:en:User talk:Jorm#Hey. In the meantime, work-me has some good news: the Editing team is looking at making the @ thing work in their new Talk pages project/replying tool, which you can test at https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Discussion_utilisatrice:Whatamidoing_(WMF)?dtenable=1

Levivich (talkcontribs)

@WhatamIdoing Interesting. Thanks again for the links–I'll read through them (and then probably pester you with more questions).

Reply to "Testing"