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
Will the Visual Editor be enabled on Talk Pages then for use of the Visual Editor user? Flow had been heralded as the solution for those not able to contribute in wikitext but if that option is off the table, what is the solution for the VE-only user?
Kerry
-----Original Message----- From: wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org [mailto:wikimedia-l-bounces@lists.wikimedia.org] On Behalf Of MZMcBride Sent: Wednesday, 2 September 2015 10:15 AM To: Wikimedia Mailing List wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Subject: Re: [Wikimedia-l] Collaboration team reprioritization
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
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I don't know how Wikimedia engineering tracks project resource usage - is there a number out there for the total cost to the WMF associated with the Flow project? At a basic minimum, the number of developer and other hours dedicated to Flow (including fully dedicated contractors)? Is it likely that this is the most expensive unsuccessful engineering effort since the WMF was founded?
Finance perspective here. My understanding is that Lila slowed the development of Flow awhile back. If Flow was turning out to be a resource intensive project with marginal benefits, then ending its development is likely to be a good management decision. A retrospective on Flow's development and end might be an interesting read, but we can be thankful that its ending was a staged shutdown rather than another VE-style explosion.
Pine
2015-09-02 3:15 GMT+03:00 MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com:
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.
This is an exaggeration.
The "Topic:P0q3m7vwysdezd2m" URL is not pretty, but this is remarkably unimportant: I've been using several personal and project-level Flow pages productively in three languages every day for the last few months. I never had any reason to think that these GUID URLs are a problem. Contrariwise, it's far more convenient to post them instead of an unstable URL with an anchor.
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.
As for new users, well, if I had a sheqel for every time that I had to explain about ::: and --~~~~ to new Wikipeia editors, I could buy a very good dinner to all the participants of this thread. With Flow I just don't need to do it - they click Reply and just reply.
I received a lot of positive feedback about Flow from my home wiki editors, both veteran and newbies.
There are nearly 900 Phab tasks for Flow, but the *only* thing that I really miss is a basic easy way to go back to old posts - be it auto-archiving with a calendar, search, filtering, or anything other way to access them, and even that has not been a blocker for productive daily use of several Flow boards. (Just as a reminder, going to old posts in classic talk pages is different on every page, according to their authors archiving style, so it's not much of a regression.)
I wish that more discussion pages on which I wrote would use Flow, and I very much hope that Flow's talk page component would be more than just "maintained and supported".
Thanks, collaboration team; I expect to see more of your skills and innovations soon.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore
Thanks for that perspective Amir. I hadn't even thought of the mobile aspect. It would be great to have improved collaboration tools for working on mobile.
Pine
On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 1:51 PM, Amir E. Aharoni < amir.aharoni@mail.huji.ac.il> wrote:
2015-09-02 3:15 GMT+03:00 MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com:
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.
This is an exaggeration.
The "Topic:P0q3m7vwysdezd2m" URL is not pretty, but this is remarkably unimportant: I've been using several personal and project-level Flow pages productively in three languages every day for the last few months. I never had any reason to think that these GUID URLs are a problem. Contrariwise, it's far more convenient to post them instead of an unstable URL with an anchor.
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.
As for new users, well, if I had a sheqel for every time that I had to explain about ::: and --~~~~ to new Wikipeia editors, I could buy a very good dinner to all the participants of this thread. With Flow I just don't need to do it - they click Reply and just reply.
I received a lot of positive feedback about Flow from my home wiki editors, both veteran and newbies.
There are nearly 900 Phab tasks for Flow, but the *only* thing that I really miss is a basic easy way to go back to old posts - be it auto-archiving with a calendar, search, filtering, or anything other way to access them, and even that has not been a blocker for productive daily use of several Flow boards. (Just as a reminder, going to old posts in classic talk pages is different on every page, according to their authors archiving style, so it's not much of a regression.)
I wish that more discussion pages on which I wrote would use Flow, and I very much hope that Flow's talk page component would be more than just "maintained and supported".
Thanks, collaboration team; I expect to see more of your skills and innovations soon.
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, mailto:wikimedia-l-request@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe
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
On Sat, Sep 5, 2015 at 12:37 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
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.
In addition to this, we still have LiquidThreads (LQT) in production.
I can understand Flow being put into maintenance mode, especially if temporarily while energy is focused elsewhere, but I believe the main Flow project should at least include:
1. dumping Flow content into the public dumps ( https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89398 ), and
2. decommissioning LiquidThreads on all Wikimedia sites by converting them to Flow
According to Wikiapiary [1] , there are still seven 'active' WMF sites using LiquidThreads.
I see LQT is still actively being used on five of them:
https://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&days=30&...
https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&days=3...
https://pt.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Especial:Mudan%C3%A7as_recentes&a...
https://fi.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Toiminnot:Tuoreet_muutokset&d... (conversion to Flow requested: T104089)
https://se.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Senaste_%C3%A4ndringar&am... (conversion to Flow requested: T106302)
But no Thread: activity on two others: http://hu.wikipedia.org/ (They are trialling Flow? T107301) http://sv.wikisource.org/
It is also installed on two locked projects: Wikimania 2010, and Wikimedia Strategic Planning. Can't they be converted to Flow ?
And it is still installed on https://www.mediawiki.org/ . Is that still necessary?
Is the current plan simply "let users request LiquidThreads pages be converted to Flow"?
Which of the above sites are only using it in user talk?
Have any of the above sites affirmatively decided they do not want to switch to Flow (yet)? If so, what are their reasons?
1. https://wikiapiary.com/w/index.php?title=Special:Ask&offset=0&limit=...
We are planning to put Flow into public dumps this month, and work with all the remaining communities still using LQT about converting to Flow. I wanted to let this announcement settle for a minute before we talk to them.
On Fri, Sep 4, 2015 at 10:23 PM, John Mark Vandenberg jayvdb@gmail.com wrote:
On Sat, Sep 5, 2015 at 12:37 PM, MZMcBride z@mzmcbride.com wrote:
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.
In addition to this, we still have LiquidThreads (LQT) in production.
I can understand Flow being put into maintenance mode, especially if temporarily while energy is focused elsewhere, but I believe the main Flow project should at least include:
- dumping Flow content into the public dumps (
https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T89398 ), and
- decommissioning LiquidThreads on all Wikimedia sites by converting
them to Flow
According to Wikiapiary [1] , there are still seven 'active' WMF sites using LiquidThreads.
I see LQT is still actively being used on five of them:
https://en.wikinews.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&days=30&...
https://en.wiktionary.org/w/index.php?title=Special:RecentChanges&days=3...
https://pt.wikibooks.org/w/index.php?title=Especial:Mudan%C3%A7as_recentes&a...
https://fi.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Toiminnot:Tuoreet_muutokset&d... (conversion to Flow requested: T104089)
https://se.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Senaste_%C3%A4ndringar&am... (conversion to Flow requested: T106302)
But no Thread: activity on two others: http://hu.wikipedia.org/ (They are trialling Flow? T107301) http://sv.wikisource.org/
It is also installed on two locked projects: Wikimania 2010, and Wikimedia Strategic Planning. Can't they be converted to Flow ?
And it is still installed on https://www.mediawiki.org/ . Is that still necessary?
Is the current plan simply "let users request LiquidThreads pages be converted to Flow"?
Which of the above sites are only using it in user talk?
Have any of the above sites affirmatively decided they do not want to switch to Flow (yet)? If so, what are their reasons?
https://wikiapiary.com/w/index.php?title=Special:Ask&offset=0&limit=...
-- John Vandenberg
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