On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 11:21 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams kwwilliams@kwwilliams.com wrote:
There doesn't seem to be any particular user demand to adopt Flow, so there's no reason to believe it will gain any more traction than LQT ever did.
There was significant community interest and momentum behind LQT including various votes to enable it [1], and there is significant interest in Flow now [2]. The main thing that prevented LQT from wider adoption was not lack of community interest, it was our decision to put the project on hold due to both major architectural concerns and resource constraints at the time. We've committed to providing an upgrade path, and this is our follow-through to that commitment.
Our main objective in Flow development is to solve for progressively more challenging collaboration/conversation use cases well, and to demonstrate positive impact at increasing scale, with the goal of providing a better experience for new and experienced editors alike. We recognize that we still have a long way to go, but we can already demonstrate that the system does one thing well, which is to make the process of using talk pages much more understandable for new users:
https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Moderated_Testing,_November,_2014:_talk_...
We're also seeing, as Nick pointed out, that users in a mentorship use case are more likely to follow-up with their mentors. This is a pretty big deal -- quantitative research shows that this type of mentorship improves engagement and retention of new users. [3]
So mentorship is an obvious early stage use case, even if the rest of a community functions through traditional talk pages. "Village pump" type pages that are fairly distinct from article talk pages are another obvious use case where a more forum-like system can relatively quickly outperform the talk page based approach that is rife with edit conflicts and other annoyances. We are trialing the first such use case in Catalan with lots of community participation.
As for inconsistency and fragmentation of mediawiki.org, if anything, the conversion of LQT pages on mediawiki.org will create greater consistency as we're already using Flow on Beta Features talk pages ( https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Talk:Content_translation is a nice example of a feedback page with lots of continuous and substantive comments from experienced users).
Flow may not serve major use cases on English Wikipedia today, or tomorrow; that's okay. Smaller projects are often happy to adopt technologies that may not meet the expectations of a large, mature community like en.wp yet, because they may be more concerned with the experience of new users than with the risks or inconveniences associated with features in earlier stages of development. (I am not dismissing either risks or inconveniences in saying so, as the requirements do of course differ at different scale.)
We, in turn, remain committed to building tools that serve users well, continuously improving, and continuously demonstrating value through data and qualitative validation. [4] This is but a small step, but it's an important one.
Erik
[1] https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/search/query/radjv9rJZNLU/#R [2] https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Flow/Rollout [3] http://arxiv.org/pdf/1409.1496v1.pdf [4] What we learn is summarized in our quarterly reviews, most recently: https://upload.wikimedia.org/wikipedia/commons/5/5f/Collaboration_Q3_2014-15...