On Mon, Jun 9, 2014 at 5:30 AM, Martijn Hoekstra <[email protected]> wrote:
> > > That's precisely my point. Because current talk page discussions are - on > the software level - unstructured, it allows social conventions to do > everything you want it to do structure wise, and to invent new uses as we > go. The domain model is just that complicated that we found that we need > that power in implementation (even if we all(tm)[citation needed] agree > that the current discussion form is pretty horrible UI wise). If you're > going to force a software structure on in it will most likely not be as > powerful[1] as what there is now and represents a trade off without us > having a clear sight of what we will lose, even if we can have a somewhat > clear picture of what we will gain: easier use and navigatability for the > kinds of discussions we do support. Discussing a trade off where only one > side is known is hard. > > [1] i.e. a tree structure is far less powerful than what we have now to > approximate the domain, a dag with dividable nodes probably comes closer, > and is already fiendishly complicated to pull off on a UI level. And then I > haven't even gone in to the current practices of taking a comment back by > striking it, which means that nodes aren't only arbitrarily and multiply > dividable, but also mutable over time in a linear(?) history? 'sblood man, > discussions are complicated. > > -- Martijn > > The assumption I think you are making here is that the goal is to get a discussion system with maximum functionality and flexibility. I think that is an interesting goal as a technical exercise, but I'm not sure I agree that this is a valuable goal for Wikimedia (although it may be for MediaWiki). The problem we have is one of non-technical users put off by excessively technical (and unstructured) means of communication. So I think a much better goal, and one that I know others share and has been the focus of development work, is to adopt a system of communication that is easy and intuitive for as many participants as possible. This may mean the problem of inventing a better mousetrap needs to be set aside in favor of determining what mechanism is the most familiar and easy for the majority of Wikimedia users. If that leads us to adopting something similar to vBulletin or another threading w/quotes discussion system, then so be it. This is a little part of what I think Risker was getting at; the technical side is focused on creating neat new products and features, but not always necessarily solving the problems that we actually have. As a general principle, I see this kind of thinking come up a lot in Wikimedia settings - the community is deeply committed to a very innovative project, which leads to the impulse to be innovative in many ways. But the core innovation is the wiki and the mission; it's not necessary to invent the best-in-class [governance system, donation system, discussion mechanism, feedback tool, etc.], and in many cases the distraction and uncertainty of trying to innovative in multiple channels presents a liability. _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list [email protected] https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l
