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