Wikipedia talk:Facebookization

DJ, Thank you for this post. For a short time I undulged myself by being called the cheerleader of https://discourse.wmflabs.org/ in the Wikipedia Weekly on Facebook. You and I contribute to Wikipedia directly or indirectly, as many others. Quite a few leave the Wikipedia website to have a conversation about Wikipedia on another website. What is your view on that? You know more of website design than I do. How to encourage our fellow Wikipedians to have their conversations about Wikipedia on Wikipedia? Sincerely yours, Ad Huikeshoven (talk) 21:45, 8 May 2016 (UTC)
 * My view is that people seek discussion in all sorts of ways and that we are not serving their needs atm. I think we do not NEED to serve all their needs however. I think that something like Flow could serve MORE of their needs. I think we didn't consider enough how Flow impacts existing discussion models. I think we need multiple ways to interact, instead of 'the one'. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 15:10, 9 May 2016 (UTC)

I moved my ramblings about discussion systems. —Th e DJ (talk • contribs) 15:10, 9 May 2016 (UTC)


 * , really liked some of the points you were making. I do feel that the foundation is sometimes a bit uneasy to move forward and experiment because it got burnt a few times, and also that some of the community is a bit too set in its ways and does not want to allow some new ideas. I think this is a fairly natural phenomenon - we don't want to break what works, and as humans we also frequently don't want to spend energy to learn new approaches (that usually have some entry cost, but might benefit us in the longer run). On the other hand, to be fair, there has always been great support for new capabilities and explorations, especially when they don't affect the existing structures. I tried to present some in the I dream of Content paper a while back. Among them are interactive content (easy to introduce), and different page layout like more narrow text to ease reading (much harder to introduce). Yet I think the later might be as important for ease of understanding as the first. In any case, I do hope we can be more risky, try various things, and be also prepared to abandon things when we see them not working. Opinion is mine, not WMF. --Yurik (talk) 02:29, 10 May 2016 (UTC)

One of the problems is equating "modern" with "good"
Some people believe that something which is "modern" is automatically better than something which is older. This is not necessarily the case. Change should only occur for a good reason; not simply change for the sake of change. We should be especially careful when it comes to "modern" websites and services which do harm to their (supposed) users. They may do things that we too can adopt, but what specifically right now do you see as needing changing here that you believe others do better? DesertPipeline (talk) 12:08, 25 June 2021 (UTC)