For a while now, the Collaboration team has been working on Flow, the
structured discussion system. I want to let you know about some changes in
that long-term plan.
While initial announcements about Flow said that it would be a universal
replacement for talk pages, the features that were ultimately built into
Flow were specifically forum-style group discussion tools. But article and
project talk pages are used for a number of important and complex processes
that those tools aren't able to handle, making Flow unsuitable for
deployment on those kinds of pages.
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.
As these workflows grow in complexity, they become more difficult for the
next generation of editors to learn and use. This has increased the
workload on the people who maintain those systems today. Complex workflows
are also difficult to adapt to other languages, because a wiki with
thousands of articles may not need the kind of complexity that comes with
managing a wiki with millions of articles. We've talked about this kind of
structured workflow support at Wikimania, in user research sessions, and on
wikis. It's an important area that needs a lot of discussion, exploration,
and work.
Starting in October, Flow will not be in active development, as we shift
the team's focus to these other priorities. We'll be helping core
contributors reduce the stress of an ever-growing workload, and helping the
next generation of contributors participate in those processes. Further
development on these projects will be driven by the needs expressed by wiki
communities.
Flow will be maintained and supported, and communities that are excited
about Flow discussions will be able to use it. There are places where the
discussion features are working well, with communities that are
enthusiastic about them: on user talk pages, help pages, and forum/village
pump-style discussion spaces. By the end of September, we'll have an opt-in
Beta feature available to communities that want it, allowing users to
enable Flow on their own user talk pages.
I'm sure people will want to know more about these projects, and we're
looking forward to those conversations. We'll be reaching out for lots of
input and feedback over the coming months.
Danny Horn
Collaboration team, PM