Thanks for that perspective Amir. I hadn't even thought of the mobile aspect. It would be great to have improved collaboration tools for working on mobile.
Pine On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.ahar...@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote: > 2015-09-02 3:15 GMT+03:00 MZMcBride <z...@mzmcbride.com>: > > What I'm struggling with here is that Flow seems to have failed to > > deliver. It hasn't met its goals of covering even basic talk pages and it > > sounds as though further development work on Flow will now be suspended. > > > > From my perspective, after over two years of development, we've basically > > accomplished creating pages such as "Topic:P0q3m7vwysdezd2m" (I wish I > > were kidding, that's an actual page title) on development wikis such as > > mediawiki.org. This is a pretty bleak outcome, in my opinion. > > This is an exaggeration. > > The "Topic:P0q3m7vwysdezd2m" URL is not pretty, but this is remarkably > unimportant: I've been using several personal and project-level Flow pages > productively in three languages every day for the last few months. I never > had any reason to think that these GUID URLs are a problem. Contrariwise, > it's far more convenient to post them instead of an unstable URL with an > anchor. > > Much more importantly, Flow very much does cover basic talk pages. You can > write a title and an OP and get people to reply. This has been working for > many months already. This is my definition of "covering basic talk pages". > > Even more importantly is that you can write a title and an OP and get > people to reply ON THEIR PHONES. This is nearly impossible on the classic > talk pages; on them you are lucky to even manage to read the existing > discussions, and typing a reply requires extra finger-acrobatics. With Flow > it's as easy as on Twitter. I do almost no coding for Mobile Frontend and > apps, but I'm a kind of a volunteer mobile technologies ambassador in my > home wiki, and good mobile support for talk pages is the #1 request that I > hear from veteran editors with regards to using Wikipedia on their phones. > This is another thing that Flow has been doing for many months already. > > As for new users, well, if I had a sheqel for every time that I had to > explain about ::: and --~~~~ to new Wikipeia editors, I could buy a very > good dinner to all the participants of this thread. With Flow I just don't > need to do it - they click Reply and just reply. > > I received a lot of positive feedback about Flow from my home wiki editors, > both veteran and newbies. > > There are nearly 900 Phab tasks for Flow, but the *only* thing that I > really miss is a basic easy way to go back to old posts - be it > auto-archiving with a calendar, search, filtering, or anything other way to > access them, and even that has not been a blocker for productive daily use > of several Flow boards. (Just as a reminder, going to old posts in classic > talk pages is different on every page, according to their authors archiving > style, so it's not much of a regression.) > > I wish that more discussion pages on which I wrote would use Flow, and I > very much hope that Flow's talk page component would be more than just > "maintained and supported". > > Thanks, collaboration team; I expect to see more of your skills and > innovations soon. > > -- > Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי > http://aharoni.wordpress.com > “We're living in pieces, > I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore > _______________________________________________ > Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: > https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines > Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org > Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, > <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe> > _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
