MZMcBride <z <at> mzmcbride.com> writes:
Forwarding this to wikimedia-l as it doesn't seem to be very technical in nature, but definitely seems worthy of discussion.
MZMcBride
Danny Horn wrote:
For a while now, the Collaboration team has been working on Flow, the structured discussion system. I want to let you know about some changes in that long-term plan.
While initial announcements about Flow said that it would be a universal replacement for talk pages, the features that were ultimately built into Flow were specifically forum-style group discussion tools. But article and project talk pages are used for a number of important and complex processes that those tools aren't able to handle, making Flow unsuitable for deployment on those kinds of pages.
To better address the needs of our core contributors, we're now focusing our strategy on the curation, collaboration, and admin processes that take place on a variety of pages. Many of these processes use complex workarounds -- templates, categories, transclusions, and lots of instructions -- that turn blank wikitext talk pages into structured workflows. There are gadgets and user scripts on the larger wikis to help with some of these workflows, but these tools aren't standardized or universally available.
Nearly every ambitious project starts with huge promises and fizzles out with a "change in focus". What's the underlying issue here? How can we get a product to a point where it's deployed and usable? I know there's a problem with scope creep for Wikimedia projects (due to design by committee), but that alone can't be the reason.
I know no one wants to admit failure, but when WMF says something is in maintenance mode they really mean they're killing the project. Can there be a postmortem for this, so that we can at least learn something from the failure?
- Ryan