On Mon, Mar 16, 2015 at 11:21 PM, Kevin Wayne Williams
<kwwilliams(a)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_2014-1…
--
Erik Möller
VP of Product & Strategy, Wikimedia Foundation