I think it takes a lot of guts to come to the conclusion, and publicly admit, that the attention of the team needs to better reflect the community's needs. From personal experience I know it wasn't easy.
This does leave me a little concerned. As a third-party MediaWiki user, a friendly talk page interface was something I was looking forward too. The people I support are non-technical and work like VisualEditor have greatly impacted the contributions from folks. Flow appeared/appears to follow in the same vein.
How does this impact having a stable release of the Flow extension for third-party users? It's still very much a beta release (multiple extensions pseudo-required as an example) and is labeled as such on Mediawiki.org.
This leaves us with unclear options when it comes to enabling a better Talk: interface from the default wikitext-heavy experience of MediaWiki.
Will Flow reach a 'stable' state for third-party users? One that you would recommend for use?
Yours, Chris Koerner clkoerner.com
P.S. Might I suggest posting this message on the Extension:Flow talk page as well? Third-party MediaWiki users should know what they're getting into if they decide to adopt Flow.
Hi, (here goes a disclaimer about me posting this email as volunteer tech ambassador in Catalan Wikipedia in my personal time)
While Flow might not be ready to make happy core enwiki contributors, in my humble (and again, personal) opinion it is clearly ready to make life easier to dozens (hundreds?) of Wikimedia projects (the smaller, probably the merrier). The Catalan Wikipedia project has gone through several iterations of Flow adoption, they basically want more, and they basically will get more. Their goal is simple: Flow everywhere.
This is not an exaggeration. The communities that work actively and directly on bringing new editors (with workshops, editathons, collaboration with schools and other face to face interactions) know that VisualEditor is a key tool. Once new editors have been trained with VisualEditor, there is no way they will enjoy or even understand why they should learn wikitext-based conventions to discuss and collaborate. Flow is the natural VisualEditor companion, and new users don't even "love it", because for them is just natural.
I'm happy to see that the possibility for users to opt-in to convert their user talk pages to Flow is close to deployment. It is an interesting way to let users show their interest and preference. I hope projects willing to enable Flow in more places will get the tools or processes to do so. I understand the demands of big projects with complex processes in their discussion pages. I just hope those requirements don't become an obstacle for the many more smaller projects that can benefit today from Flow. Time will tell.
About Flow for third party MediaWikis (let me change my hat again, now as admin of a small wiki in a 3rd party wiki farm), at least https://miraheze.org/ is offering Flow to wikis requesting it. It works, with script to archive wikitext discussion pages an all. If they have done it, I guess other third parties can do it.
Anyway, did I say Thank You Flow Team? :) You rock, and you will continue to rock.
To clarify: Starting in October, Flow will be maintained; it's not being abandoned. Further work on the discussion system will need to be driven by communities voicing their desire for further work on it. Additional development on the discussion system will be prioritized on community request and on a project by project basis.
As a pattern that we're all familiar with, it's more likely that people will comment when they have negative or critical feedback, particularly at a centralized forum. While it's helpful to point out things that are not user-friendly or are frustrating to use, it's also helpful for the team to know what is going well - so we can do more of it. I’d like to encourage people to speak up (here or onwiki) when there's positive feedback as well – this goes for article-editors as much as software-developers. There are people on many wikis who have been happily using Flow, but they haven't gone out of their way to broadcast that information off of their usual home wiki. What do you like about this software? Is it headed in the right direction, even if it doesn’t seem complete? Are there things about it that the Collaboration team could continue to focus on?
See also, the thread on wikitech-l, for additional discussion. http://thread.gmane.org/gmane.science.linguistics.wikipedia.technical/83889
Hope that helps
Quick followup, with a reminder that onwiki feedback would be ideal. The original message is replicated at https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Topic:So4pui07y03ibgqq and your input there will be greatly appreciated. Thanks.
wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org