Amir E. Aharoni wrote:
Much more importantly, Flow very much does cover basic talk pages. You can write a title and an OP and get people to reply. This has been working for many months already. This is my definition of "covering basic talk pages".
Even more importantly is that you can write a title and an OP and get people to reply ON THEIR PHONES. This is nearly impossible on the classic talk pages; on them you are lucky to even manage to read the existing discussions, and typing a reply requires extra finger-acrobatics. With Flow it's as easy as on Twitter. I do almost no coding for Mobile Frontend and apps, but I'm a kind of a volunteer mobile technologies ambassador in my home wiki, and good mobile support for talk pages is the #1 request that I hear from veteran editors with regards to using Wikipedia on their phones. This is another thing that Flow has been doing for many months already.
I think most of the points you raise here are true of LiquidThreads or _any_ prototype of a discussion system. Yes, you get a reply button instead of needing ":: ~~~~" wikitext. That's great, I agree, but after having watched LiquidThreads rot and then seeing a lot of time, money, and effort put into Flow, I'm pretty dissatisfied with the deliverable being essentially a very intricate proof-of-concept. I think not getting Flow fully deployed to Wikimedia wikis is objectively a large failure to deliver. Consequently, it seems most prudent to be asking what went wrong and how it will be better next time. The underlying reality is that we still need a better on-wiki discussion system and it now looks like neither LiquidThreads nor Flow are going to be it.
MZMcBride