Danny Horn wrote:
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.
I absolutely agree that existing wiki workflows need love. I think anyone who has looked at various wiki request for deletion processes, for example, easily sees and understands the need for a better system.
What I'm struggling with here is that Flow seems to have failed to deliver. It hasn't met its goals of covering even basic talk pages and it sounds as though further development work on Flow will now be suspended.
From my perspective, after over two years of development, we've basically
accomplished creating pages such as "Topic:P0q3m7vwysdezd2m" (I wish I were kidding, that's an actual page title) on development wikis such as mediawiki.org. This is a pretty bleak outcome, in my opinion.
Given the failure in addressing basic talk pages, why would anyone trust the Collaboration team to work on and improve more complex workflows? I don't see a track record of success or, alternately, a good explanation for why the previous work has failed and what will be better next time.
MZMcBride