Yes, the people working on Flow have mastered wiki text talk pages. One of
the engineers is User:Superm401, an admin on enwiki, and the product
manager is Danny Horn, who has been a regular MediaWiki user for years.
As a meta point, you don't actually need to be a hardcore power user of any
particular product to understand user needs. It helps, but it can also
actually hurt when you're trying to design something new that doesn't have
the same flaws. The field of user experience design and usability testing
has a host of techniques to enable a skilled person to investigate and
understand user needs that don't yet know through direct experience. That
is why Wikimedia hires people with academic and professional experience in
these fields.
Post by MZMcBridePost by Vibha BambaI tried to get into that conversation and leave a message for Kevin
Song. I could not use the regular talk page after using flow for
Hovercards for the last 12 months. This is what millions of readers
getting into the system feel like.
Click edit.
Post by Vibha BambaI hope flow ships this year.
Concerned sighs.
Just curious, what's the concern? Wikipedia's SEO? Have you read comments
on other sites (e.g., YouTube) and compared to comments on Wikimedia
wikis? There's a real cost to reducing barrier to entry. And, for what
it's worth, tens of thousands of people engage in lengthy, sometimes
multi-year, conversations using wikitext. Perhaps you're the outlier. :-)
I hope people working directly on Flow have mastered wikitext talk pages.
As we've previously discussed on this mailing list, it's incredibly
difficult to build a better solution without first fully understanding the
use-cases, requirements, and intricacies of the current system.
MZMcBride
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