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This is an old revision of this page, as edited by 24.97.221.98 (talk) at 20:33, 21 November 2013 (→Disappointed). The present address (URL) is a permanent link to this revision, which may differ significantly from the current revision.


Request for your feedback: Let's talk about nesting!

Background

Talk pages are completely unstructured data; Flow is structured data. Unlike talk pages, which were created before the existence of smartphones, we have to account for how Flow will look on phones and tablets, which are currently ~20% of our readership traffic and swiftly growing. That means we have to make some choices about how we want discussion threads to look – specifically, how to make it clear who's talking to whom without creating an unreadable mess.

I question the necessity of making talk pages completely conform to smartphones' whims. I doubt many people edit Wikipedia or contribute to talk pages on mobile devices. Maybe 1%.

67.252.103.23 (talk) 01:19, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Take a look through the list of discussion communities and their nesting levels below (feel free to add more examples to it, too). If you've had discussions on any of these sites (or just browsed through them for a minute as a reader), what are the pros and cons you took away from the experience? (E.g., confusing to follow long conversations? hard to read on a phone? just right?) I'm seeding this with my observations, but you're welcome to add your own. This isn't a vote; I'm just trying to kicking off a conversation :)

Flat, zero levels of nesting

(flat conversations, one reply button, replies go to the bottom of the stack)

Comment
Reply
Reply to reply
Reply


Examples of products using this pattern
  1. old YouTube
  2. Twitter
  3. Flickr
  4. PhpBB
  5. Simple Machines Forum
  6. Gawker
  7. Discourse
Pros/cons?

One level of nesting

(initial comment, all replies to that comment are flat)

Comment

Reply
Reply to reply
Reply
Examples of products using this pattern
  1. Facebook
  2. new YouTube
  3. Gizmodo
Pros/cons?

Two levels of nesting

(initial comment, answers, and replies to comment/answers that are less prominent)

Comment

Reply
Reply to reply
Reply
Examples of products using this pattern
  1. StackOverflow
  2. Medium
It's worth noting that on StackOverflow (and the other StackExchange sites) there are also separate "chat rooms" - essentially a zero level of nesting conversation - where free-form discussion is encouraged to take place. While it's important that we adhere to WP:FORUM (and Flow doesn't encourage too much forumy behaviour) it's also important to remember that one of the primary reasons for a talk page is to build consensus, and you can't do that without relatively free discussion.
On the subject of the StackExchange UI though, the ability to vote-up and vote-down questions, answers and comments might be an idea we want to borrow. We do a lot of polling and !voting on Wikipedia talk pages and we need a way for Flow to cope with that, including an easy way to count the !votes. WaggersTALK 13:13, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
@ Waggers, interesting, I didn't know about the StackExchange chat room space... I guess SO's front-page discussion system doesn't quite meet all the needs of its users, if they require an alternate method for backchatting. That's definitely true of Wikipedia, too; some project areas may need more structure in their discussions, and some may need less, so we want to stay open to different configurations. I see you're a member of a couple of WikiProjects – from your experience, do those feel more like StackOverflow-type spaces where people ask questions and want answers, or more like informal chat/forum between members?
On the consensus front: it seems to me that, in a way, StackExchange is also about building consensus (e.g., "what's the best answer for this question?"), and they've created the two-tiered system to encourage people to focus on the topic at hand, instead of spiralling off into back-and-forth 2-person tangents. You can still tangent in the comments, but those are just displayed in a way that makes it clear they're not part of the main discussion.
Polls, !votes, upvote/downvoting, and other methods of gathering the pulse of the crowd are really interesting. I don't think we're going to get to exploring those options in Flow the near future, but it's definitely something to think about. I'm not sure how the wider editing community feels about these methods, though. There may be some users who have used StackExchange and other sites (e.g., Slashdot) and like them, but I've heard people express some misgivings about creating those kinds of filtering mechanisms on Wikipedia. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 19:46, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
About polling, it's helpful to recognize that the consensus at the English Wikipedia is at WP:POLL. --Tryptofish (talk) 23:12, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
...Yep, the notion of "voting" without being able (or perhaps forced) to give an accompanying explanatory comment isn't what we want to encourage. I've put together a quick example of a typical consensus building discussion format - it would be good to see Flow supporting something like this kind of structure. WaggersTALK 07:30, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
@ Waggers, that looks like slide 25 of a deck I put together for Wikimania :)
The current structure of proposals evolved to look like this in part due to the technical constraints of Mediawiki – e.g., there's no concept of in-line annotation, so you can't make minor quibbles/critiques in place and have to put them in a separate section; there's no metadata associated with conversations, so you can't display the number of users participating at a glance. Flow won't be limited by those constraints, so we have a lot more room to experiment :) I'm curious, for example, what the purpose of a !vote section separate from the discussion section really is. Is it just to get a quick headcount? Give the closing admin/uninvolved user a visual cue in cases of WP:SNOW? What if we instead let people provide their detailed support/oppose comments in the "support" and "oppose" sections of a proposal and simply displayed the number of users commenting in each of those sections? Something like the headers in Gawker Media comments? Not saying we should do this; just wondering if there's more to the !votes section than, well, basically just a vote, and if discussion is really where all the important consensus-making happens. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 23:39, 30 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
It depends. An RFA is pretty much a vote. Wiktionary is pretty much voting. In those discussions, a comment is about influencing other people's votes. On other pages, it's really the other way around: the analysis matters more than the !vote. User:Beeblebrox/The perfect policy proposal#Planning the RFC might be interesting reading. User:Beeblebrox could probably provide even more information. WhatamIdoing (talk) 00:42, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Maryana, people organize RfCs in different ways. Sometimes, particularly with RfCs that you know won't attract much input, there's no need for a separate "survey" section. Where the RfC is likely to attract more attention, people add a separate survey section to make things easier for the closing editor or admin; I've closed a lot of RfCs and it's really difficult to pick out the main comment from each person, and just one from each, if the comments are only in a discussion section (where things get very repetitive). When the RfC is likely to be very large, people sometimes do add separate support/oppose sections and ask that the responses be numbered. That makes it more vote-like and easier to close.
Consensus matters a lot and so numbers do count; analysis counts only in the sense that the closing editor has to make sure that policy has been respected. So, for example, if 100 people vote for an umambiguous BLP violation and one against, the closing editor will (hopefully) close in favour of the latter. But where the policy issue could go either way, the numbers are obviously pivotal, and in those cases (and I think that is probably most cases), it does end up as a vote. SlimVirgin (talk) 00:55, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
SlimVirgin, WhatamIdoing, thanks, this is really helpful! As I said somewhere above, the Flow team won't be tackling complex consensus-building discussions like RfA, RfC, AfD, ArbCom, VPR, etc. for some time; one of the many reasons why we're planning to release on a page-by-page basis for now, not to entire namespaces. But when we do get to that bridge, I'll definitely be pestering you two for guidance/help :) Maryana (WMF) (talk) 01:10, 3 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Three levels of nesting

(initial comment, reply, replies to replies, replies to replies to replies)

Comment

Reply
Reply to reply
Reply to reply to reply
Reply
Examples of products using this pattern
  1. Mailman
Pros/cons?

8-12 levels of nesting

(like the above, but even more nested!)

Comment

Reply
Reply to reply
Reply to reply to reply
Reply to reply
Reply to reply to reply
(outdent)

Reply

Reply
Examples of products using this pattern
  1. The Verge
  2. Reddit
  3. Wikipedia (effectively) after which people use {{outdent}}
  4. Quora
  5. Tumblr (3-5 is common, 11 is rare)
Pros/cons?
  • on a small screen, pretty much unreadable without a ton of work (clicking, scrolling, zooming, pinching), and all but impossible to add new comments
  • where do I respond (to the topic as a whole, to individual comments)? Maryana (WMF) (talk) 22:44, 26 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Why do we say that it is "all but impossible to add new comments"? New comments are added all the time on Wikipedia discussion pages. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 19:07, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I think that point was just in reference to small screens (particularly mobile), where deep indents (and particularly :*:: mixings) are harder to compose a reply to. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 19:48, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yes, of course. Thanks. --Atethnekos (Discussion, Contributions) 19:52, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Yep, if you've ever tried to edit a talk page on a phone, it's... well, not pretty. Even on a tablet, it's pretty painful and frustrating, and the number of users we have on tablets is steadily growing. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 00:04, 2 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

30+ or more levels of nesting

Examples of products using this pattern
  1. Liquidthreads
  2. Thunderbird email subject lines
  3. Livejournal
Pros/cons?
  • yikes... Maryana (WMF) (talk) 22:44, 26 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • Comment Writing as one who has never taken part in any of the above mentioned sites (and has no intention of joining any of them either...), I find it a bit hard to understand what is being talked about. I've seen the mock-ups of 'Flow', and can't see that it's any improvement over the current system. It only takes a moment to explain indenting to a newbie - and if they can't understand that, they're not going to make any sense of anything. If Flow works anything like as well as VE has, we're going to be in a mess. And not able to talk about it unless there is some sort of opt-out provided. That I can't see happening. It's going to be all or nothing. I get the feeling sometimes that there's a similarity to the highways departments that have to ban parking on a road to speed the traffic flow up, and then put speed humps in to slow the traffic down again. They have to be seen to be doing something in order to justify their existence. Peridon (talk) 07:45, 27 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
    Well, frankly given the backlog of software improvements, if we were merely trying to justify our existence there's a ton of things we could be working on other than this - I would assume that you, like all of the users I speak to (me included!) have a ton of ideas for changes that would improve editing. I think there may be a point of confusion here, though; explaining indenting to new users, as you say, does not take very long - in principle. But then we have "when is it appropriate to outdent?" and "What do I do if I have multiple replies to multiple users?" and a ton of other awkward edge-cases that occur every day and aren't necessarily covered by "count the number of colons in the post you're replying to, then add one". Here, for example, it's asterisk, then asterisk colon, then asterisk colon colon, then.... and the same thing would happen if we had numbered rather than bullet-pointed entries. There are various different formats for discussions.
    For me the greater problem with talkpages and indenting - for new users and for existing users - has always been things like screen width and information density. Explaining indenting to new users - setting aside the edge cases - is easy. Reading the resulting talkpages, with comments offset from each other 8 or 9 times, can be an eye-ache that encourages people to (at best) skim-read discussions or simply not participate. The prime example here is tablets and phones, which don't deal well with horizontal scrolling and will need to horizontally scroll for more than a couple of levels of indenting, but I have the same problem on the laptop I'm using right now. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:02, 28 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Nice to see a WMF representative admitting that indentation is not nearly hard enough to be a significant barrier. Can we put this point to the main page..? I think you'll have to agree that "Simultaneously, we know that freeform wikitext talk pages present a significant barrier to new users" overstates things and doesn't emphasise what you do.
Also, a discussion that is complex and long enough to have "comments offset from each other 8 or 9 times" is likely to be complex enough to get "people to (at best) skim-read discussions or simply not participate" by its length alone... Speaking of asterisks - I have deliberately used ":::" instead of "*::" in this post... Did you notice a difference until now..?
Anyway, perhaps the most important thing is that the tone you are using here is exactly what all WMF representatives should seek to imitate. There is nothing wrong with exploring different possibilities to improve the talk pages, as long as it is a truly free exploration that doesn't even rule out the answer "We have found nothing better than we had.". It is when we get the unreasonable hype of the product that doesn't even exist ("a great piece of open source software", "a kick-ass discussion system", "No edit conflicts, ever." and the like) that we start to "check for our wallet" (figuratively, of course). And such mistrust is not something you should strive to promote... So, thank you for the change of tone. --Martynas Patasius (talk) 00:12, 29 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Thanks! I think Maryana, Quiddity and others would agree with me that hype is not something we particularly want. We want to make the positives of this system clear, but there will be some negatives (no system is perfect for every user), and above all this early period is about experimenting, not setting in stone Precisely What Will Definitely Happen. We (the WMF and the community) don't have all the answers yet, be it as to what is technically possible or what is socially possible, and so it would be unfair of us to act as if we could see the future with perfect clarity.
One point of clarity would be that while I don't think teaching new users how to edit with indenting is necessarily the hardest thing in the world (although it does present some barrier, and there are lots of awkward edge-cases that raise that), a necessary skill for being able to reply to a thread is being able to read and understand it. High levels of indenting are sort of a problem there, since they make the page more difficult to comprehend - I had to pass over your post 2-3 times to fully get it, and I've been editing since 2006. So there is a barrier there, just an indirect one.
I think clarifying/expanding on "freeform wikitext" is probably worth doing, to prevent misunderstandings, although I don't see it as being analogous to "indenting" - more "indenting, and markup, and templates, and everything else". Do you have any thoughts on language, there? Quiddity, Maryana, your thoughts? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 21:03, 29 September 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Regarding "freeform wikitext", the initial discoverability of all the systems seem to be the hard part - eg. all the newcomers who start new threads at the page top, or within an existing section (without a new header). All the difficulties with getting paragraph breaks to display properly (currently we mis-use the HTML definition list elements to create indents and paragraphs) with some people adding extra blank lines to create whitespace, and some people objecting per WP:LISTGAP, etc. The habit that some people have, of adding indents no matter who they're replying to, just to make the comment-separation clear.
Trying to explain any of these standards (even in person, with all the added ease that over-the-shoulder-teaching brings), to my friends and acquaintances who are less comfortable with computers (eg. the owner of a local antiquarian bookstore, who reads old books all day, and recently got online) is often frustrating.
I'm not sure how to condense that down into a brief sentence or two. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 00:36, 1 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]
  • The question posed here is too broad. There is a plethora of different types of discussion here on just one language Wikipedia, and the level of appropriate indentation differs accordingly. Some discussion structures such as Arbitration Committee cases are highly complex with nested replies allowed in some sections but not in others; some are headed with multiple nested replies permitted, such as AFD or RFC; some are mainly unnested, while some are completely freeform. Perhaps the question could best be answered after having had sight of the taxonomy of discussion structures. Spectral sequence (talk) 15:56, 11 October 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sandbox release plan and survey

Hey all

So, a couple of things I'd really like some feedback on:

  • For the sandbox release (that's "have everyone hammer on it on a labs instance, where it can't do any damage if it breaks, and try to break it") we've written up a semi-compressed release and engagement plan here I'd be very grateful if you could let me know what I've missed out, and how people feel about the plan.
  • I've written up the first draft of the new contributors survey. What's missing, what's wrong, what else needs to be asked? Let me know (User:Liz, This Means You ;p). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 00:11, 13 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'll do what I can. ;-) Liz Read! Talk! 00:15, 13 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
P.S. You know, through all of my academic endeavors, I've never run into people who use the word "tranche" except for Wikipedia. We just usually say test group, cohort, class, segment, etc. L.
Yeah, I'm used to using "cohort" or "bucket" - I'm not sure where in the movement gestalt "tranche" came from, but it's taken hold of my brain. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 01:15, 13 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
OK, I am not Liz, but I also like the idea of using data instead of just guesses to find out what the supposed beneficiaries of the system need. So, some comments about the current state ([1]) of survey draft:
  • The goal "How they understand the purpose of talkpages" is useless, unless we use it correctly. The wrong understanding of the goal of discussion system simply means that all other answers of the given user are irrelevant to us. After all, "Flow" is not supposed to change the purpose of discussions in Wikipedia.
  • Other goals are fine.
  • "That's fine for experienced users, but a hurdle for newcomers, many of whom haven't used talk pages before (or have had difficulties doing so)." - please do not poison the well. The survey simply gives us a larger and "more random" sample; there is something to be said in favour of survey of "experienced users" as well.
  • The sample is taken from "users who have registered in the last 2 weeks, and made at least 5 edits during that period, and not been blocked" - why not a month..?
  • Out of options for distribution the second one ("We can liaise with the Growth team to display a notification or message to users falling within that class for a certain time period.") is the only one that is acceptable. "More of that delivery process would be automated (automated is good!) but it requires engineering time, either from Growth or Core." - yes, it often takes some effort to do things right. Did you imagine anything else will be the case for "Flow"..?
  • Then, the questions... "If you wanted to start a discussion with other users on Wikipedia, do you know where you could do that?" - well, sure - in a pub! OK, here you want to find out if users have noticed the talk pages, thus you must formulate the question in a way that rules pubs out. Maybe you could show some images that highlight talk pages and ask if they are familiar with, well, talk pages..?
  • "Which of these types of discussions do you think are appropriate to have on a Wikipedia discussion page?" - "Wikipedia discussion page" might be understood to mean a discussion page in Wikipedia namespace, like WP:ANI. Change it to "article talk pages" or just "talk pages" (the term should be introduced in a previous question).
  • "Asking for help" is ambiguous. It might be help related to Wikipedia or help related to some homework...
  • "Have you tried contributing to Wikipedia's talk pages?" - "contributing"..? Just "using".
  • "I find it easy to discover when other people have replied to a conversation I am participating in" - OK, I know you want to get answer "No" and use it as evidence in favour of "Flow", but new users are rather unlikely to have the opportunity to get replies in just 2 weeks...
  • What you should be asking is "Was anything hard while using the talk pages?" and "Are there any specific reasons why you did not use the talk pages?". The answers must include something like "I had nothing useful to say.", "The subject of discussion was hard to understand.", "The participants of discussion seemed to be hostile or impolite.", "It was hard to find the discussion.", "It was hard to express my opinion in English.", "It was hard to write using the technical means being used in Wikipedia."...
  • If you have a goal to find out "How good or bad they find the current system", ask the question about it.
Maybe that should be enough for now... --Martynas Patasius (talk) 09:40, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
In order:
  1. Well, yes. That's why we're asking how they understand the purpose of talkpages.
  2. I'm not sure how that's poisoning the well (or has any impact on the survey; that's not included in the survey)
  3. A month is perfectly valid - I'll expand to a month tomorrow when we've given some time for replies to filter in.
  4. Why are the other two methods not valid?
  5. That doesn't seem to be a valid interpretation; see the clause on Wikipedia.
  6. Talk pages are problematic: people may not know them as "talk" pages (it's the same problem that "discussion pages" has, just from the other direction).
  7. Possibly, but frankly things like the refdesk means that already exists and is a use case we have to support. Since we're limiting the pool to people who've made >5 edits I suspect the users who are being questioned aren't here for that kind of assistance.
  8. I'll reply when you can phrase it in a way that doesn't assume bad faith.
  9. A good suggestion, but we're hoping long-form questions about this will provide more interesting data. "It was hard to understand" doesn't tell us why - is the text hard to read? is it difficult to distinguish comments?
  10. We do. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:24, 20 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

"A simple comment field"

The statement on the "Expected" side seems misleading. Your (the WMF, or at least, the Flow Team's) expectations seem to be "A simple comment field with a restricted format". If that's not the user's expectation, the disconnect needs to be explained. If it is the user's expectation, then it should be stated that way. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 11:45, 14 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

All of the entries there should be understood to be user expectations - staffers don't have expectations of a simple comment field with a restricted format, because (I'd hope) staffers have edited pretty frequenty ;p. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:23, 14 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
People who have read the discussions now expect a simple comment field with a restricted format, although if Parsoid is expanded to handle anything which resolves to "legal" HTML, rather than something where each user-entry-element is required to be something which resolves to "legal" HTML, that would be different. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 22:29, 14 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I'm somewhat confused by that, I'm afraid. Could you clarify? Sorry to be obtuse - I promise it's not intentional :/. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 23:33, 14 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Until such time as "Flow" messages are allowed to include (or transclude, or otherwise display) any Wikicode which is legal (and generates valid HTML, even if not accepted by [the present incarnation of] Parsoid) in articles, the format is restricted. The product as conceived by some of the WMF people here seems to disallow use of paired templates which are presently used in some articles, where the first generates an open HTML tag, and the second closes it. That's a restriction. Unless some WMF people deny that is intended, it's a planned restriction. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 18:59, 17 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
That makes a lot more sense, but I'm not sure if paired templates are rejected - unless your argument is they're rejected in parsoid? Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:12, 20 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
According to the documentation, Parsoid would reject paired templates if fully implemented. The implementation used by VE apparently isn't as documented. I don't know if I could depend on undocumented (in fact, anti-documented) features being retained as Flow is rolled out. — Arthur Rubin (talk) 01:36, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Ech; yeah, that's non-ideal, but I'm not sure if it's a problem we can solve for - what Parsoid implements if what Parsoid implements. When the VE team is back from India I'll poke them and get their perspective on this (feel free to ping me if I forget and go silent). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:49, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Nobody does need Flow

We did not have it a decade, we don't need to take yet another step in the Facebookication of Wikipedia for another decade. --Matthiasb (talk) 02:48, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Sorry, but I don't think you chose the best approach...
First, "Nobody does need Flow" is inaccurate: WMF does seem to need it. Perhaps to justify their relatively great expenses, perhaps to avoid the loss of face, perhaps because they naively think this project will create "Heaven on Earth"... But in any case, WMF does not count as "nobody".
Second, this is not going to persuade anyone from WMF. You did not list any arguments and you do not have overwhelming numbers behind you at the moment. And I am afraid that the ones who push for "Flow" actually like "Facebook"... Yes, that might be tasteless, but you won't correct that tastelessness by one sentence.
Third, such outbursts might serve as pretexts for WMF to pretend that the opposition to "Flow" is irrational. That actually hurts our case.
And yes, I am telling you that as someone who does not happen to like "Flow" and WMF that much.
So, please, no more emotional outbursts. Tactics do matter. --Martynas Patasius (talk) 03:15, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Sorry but I need Flow. Having a discussion where you post on my talk page and I reply on yours? That is so clumsy.
Leaving a comment on an article talk page and having to check back every wek or so to see if there has been a reply? Also clumsy.
Having every response to my comments on one page, where I can find them and reply to them; that would be great. filceolaire (talk) 08:15, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I need Flow, and I still use Gopher on a regular basis.[2] See http://gopher.floodgap.com/overbite/ --Guy Macon (talk) 10:31, 16 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
Ditto, as a frequent IRCer (although obviously, as a WMF staffer I'm just trying to justify my salary ;)). Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 19:11, 20 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
What I needed (badly!) was a Wikibreak, and now that I look back here, I'm happy to see how peaceful this talk page is! --Tryptofish (talk) 21:39, 20 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

Disappointed

Personally, I do not find Flow intuitive after becoming familiar with the current format of Talk pages. I think if it is released it will alienate many experienced Wikipedia contributors. The great thing about the current Talk system is that it functions identically to articles. This means -- if you can edit a Wikipedia article, then you should have no problem contributing to a Talk page. Current Talk pages use Wikipedia:Wikitext, lending to amazing flexibility and sophisticated usage. I would much prefer WMF simply patching the current system.

Talk pages are not supposed to function as forums do. The open talk format (Wikipedia:Wikitext) discourages lengthy threads and flame-wars.

67.252.103.23 (talk) 01:03, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]

I'd agree and disagree. So, some degree of adjustment is to be expected with any new system, and I don't begrudge you for not finding it intuitive as someone familiar with the status quo (I didn't, to start with). Are there any specific things you can point out that we need to improve on?
I also agree that talk pages are not supposed to function as forums do; that's not really our goal (when I think "forums" I think highly structured content existing in completely discrete locations) - we just want to make talk pages more intuitive to use. At the moment, as you say, wikitext is the primary hurdle to cross when using both articles and talk pages, but it's not the only hurdle by a long way; having to learn two different systems will increase complexity, but hopefully the cognitive load of learning to use talk pages overall will be reduced. Okeyes (WMF) (talk) 17:48, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
I just hate to see the use of Wikitext be discouraged. You can do pretty incredible stuff with categories, substitutions, templates such as

{{Warning|foo

 Question: bar
and other stuff that I fail to see how Flow will support effectively. It feels like Flow cuts itself off from the rest of the MediaWiki ecosystem.
24.97.221.98 (talk) 20:33, 21 November 2013 (UTC)[reply]
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