User:Risker/About Flow as of 6 September 2014

I'm not going to reply in-line here, because I think there's been an undoubtedly unintentional missing of the point here. Instead I will tell a story about a friend of mine.

Some years ago, when her children were 3 and 4, their family had a lovely traditional Christmas Day, but something felt like it was "missing". She told her husband about a tradition in her own family, where she and her siblings had (since they were very young children) always bought their mother a Terry's Chocolate Orange for Christmas - no matter what else her mom got, that was considered the one "essential" Christmas gift under the tree. Mom would glow with joy when she unwrapped it, and her most heartfelt thanks was for this specific present. Some time later in the day, she'd smack it open and everyone would get a piece. My friend thought it would be wonderful to start a similar tradition in her own young family.

Her husband remembered this story in the weeks leading up to the next Christmas. He plotted with the children, now 4 and 5; he researched the "best" types of similar treats; and ultimately he "helped" the children obtain a chocolate orange made of the finest Swiss chocolate, filled with Grand Marnier liqueur, presented in an elegant marquetry box. Everyone was surprised when she burst into tears instead of smiles, and spent the whole day snapping at people and generally being a grouch. Finally her husband confronted her and insisted she explain her behaviour.

What happened, of course, was that despite his best efforts, he'd missed the real purpose of the chocolate orange. He thought it was symbolic of the esteem in which the matriarch was held. Really, it was about the familial sharing of a special treat; the joy that the sharing brought to both the recipient and the presenters. But she couldn't share liqueur-filled chocolate with her children, and could barely bring herself to smack open the beautifully designed and presented chocolate. In other words, even though the gift looked brilliant on paper, it missed the point.

I think the design of Flow is much like the liqueur-filled chocolates. It's missed the point of a discussion space on Wikimedia projects. All the use cases in the world, no matter how carefully researched and accounted for, will help you build a discussion system to effectively replace a discussion system if you don't understand that the one overriding, incontrovertible feature of the current system is that it is a page that acts just like all the other wiki pages, with all the same functions, and anyone who can work on one wiki-page can work on any of them. In other words, you're building something that is explicitly different from wiki-pages - but the expectation of the majority of the people who will use these pages is that they work exactly like any other wiki-page.

This is what I mean when I say that you've not really understood how wiki-discussion functions, and you've created the "bells and whistles" without demonstrating an understanding of what the real, core functions of these pages are. The priority in design should focus on being able to produce identical results for basic wiki-editing and page management: we move pages, we protect them, we undo and revert edits, we fix typos and correct URLS and links in each other's posts, we quote each other and copy/paste, we modify each other's words when collaborating on the wording of a complex section of an article, we get rid of trolling, we delete and sometimes suppress personal attacks, we hat and archive individual discussions. Whether or not a post gets auto-signed is a "frill" compared to those basic functions, and it is inevitable that the deprioritization of "the basics" will result in people not really caring much about the frills (no matter how well they are executed) and focusing instead on what the new "system" doesn't do. This is the real parallel between Flow and Visual Editor - focusing on the "difference" between the new product and that it was intended to replace, instead of ensuring that things that had to be similar or identical were considered the first step of design.

The happy ending

Someone just pinged me to ask me if there was a "happy ending" to my story above. And there is, actually.

Every Christmas, my friend now receives a Terry's Chocolate Orange under the Christmas tree, a gift from her children who are now in their late teens. And every year, it is presented in the elegant marquetry box from that first unfortunate try at creating a new tradition. Every year, they all laugh when she opens the gift, and recount the story of that "first try" while sharing the chocolate orange segments as a family. They have, as it turns out, created a new tradition, one that works for their own family, because they had the necessary bond between themselves and the genuine desire to keep trying until they got it right. Risker (talk) 02:07, 7 September 2014 (UTC)