Summary: we'll convert some LiquidThreads conversations on mediawiki.org into Flow boards on test2wiki. The real move off LQT depends on changing how Flow pages are enabled, which has further dependencies.

Danny Horn, Erik Bernhardson, quiddity, and I  met to talk about next steps in moving off LiquidThreads, which is deployed on 13 wikis. We will eventually convert all their LQT pages and threads to Flow boards and topics.

There are inter-dependencies:

We would need to enable Flow on 8 new wikis in order to convert all those LQT pages.  (We would probably leave wikimania2010wiki as is.)  Our initial focus will be mediawiki.org.

Kill LQT on mediawiki.org means 1,500 pages become Flow boards

  -> that's impractical to manage with the current PHP FlowOccupyPages variable

     So we need to replace it with a Special page to enable/disable Flow.

     -> which depends on Bug 49193 - "Add ContentHandler columns to Wikimedia wikis, and set $wgContentHandlerUseDB = true"

         -> which hasn't completed and is blocked by bug 70901

We have a patch that replaces FlowOccupyPages with a bare-bones Special page to change a page between wiki text and Flow board. Eventually enabling Flow on a page is going to be a wiki administrative function, a big change that's a win for decentralization and local decision-making.  We would restrict this Special page to Flow team on mediawiki.org at first, but there would be pushback if we do this on other wikis.

As Andrew Werdna suggested, the Special page would eventually handle the conversion from an LQT page to Flow, and if you disable Flow it would convert the Flow board into wikitext.  Lots to do.

In the interim we are going to focus on the script that converts a LQT page into a Flow board.  We need to show this to people who will be affected by the change from LQT to Flow.

TODO:  change current script to target a LQT page on mediawiki.org and convert it into Flow boards and topics on test2wiki, without changing the original.
(We'll write this conversion script  so it can eventually be called from the Special page to enable Flow.)

We'll create a "Test Zero" LQT page with Flow team members participating, and convert that. Then we'll convert a few actual LQT pages from mw.org onto test2wiki.

Notes on the conversion script:

*  It'll produce weird results if run multiple times on the same LQT page.
*  Not sure what happens to multiple thread edits.

* Conversion needs to add the converted Flow board and topics to the watchlists of users wwho were watching the LQT page and threads.

* Conversion will create redirects for common LQT URLs, but not e.g. the Summary namespace URLs.

* Conversion itself will not generate Echo notifications and e-mails

quiddity mentioned the following as likely concerns of LQT users after the conversion to Flow:

*  LQT TOC  (we should have a nice Flow TOC soon!)

*  Splitting and merging threads:

*  Moving threads to a new Talk page.

*  User-friendly Topic names, e.g. Thread:Extension_talk:Flow/Appearance/reply_(6) becomes Topic:Rylnpvcpshj9n30s#flow-post-rylnvqsqmjnng558

Project planning goes on in <https://trello.com/c/0VP635yr/683-tracking-when-should-we-kill-lqt> and related cards.

Cheers.
--

=S Page  Features engineer

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