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Priorities for the Collaboration (Flow) team

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Quiddity (WMF) (留言贡献)

Hi everyone, here's a copy of the message from Dannyh:

(My apologies for writing in English)

I want to let you know about some changes to the plan for Flow development. I'm going to post the official message about it below, but here's what's important for Zhwp:

We're going to stop active development on Flow after September, so the team can work on a Workflows feature. There are a couple Flow feature changes coming this month, including an opt-in Beta feature so that people can turn Flow on for their own user talk pages. Then in October, we're going to focus on Workflows. Flow is still going to be supported and maintained.

Here's the longer message, and I'm happy to talk if you want to know more.


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.

Shangkuanlc (留言贡献)

Sounds like the Wikimedians contributing in Chinese content need to express their interests on developing this...

Liuxinyu970226 (留言贡献)

(-)反对NOOOOO! Please keep it, it's a very colorful discussion system, as with traditional talk page I can't use VisualEditor, which is a happy editor for us!

Taiwania Justo (留言贡献)

I strongly recommened that we should continue to develop FLOW discussion function. I believe that our test in Chinese Wikipedia can solve many same problems in another Wikipedia for different languages.

Shangkuanlc (留言贡献)

Hello, @Quiddity (WMF)

There is a brief translation about this major update from the development team to the technology board of Chinese Wikipedia. Thank you for let us know your decision. Somehow, I think most of the Wikipedia editors in Chinese Wikipedia is positive on this (at least there is not negative feedback for now.)

So what does it count as a opt-in beta community? If there is more detail, I may bring the updates back to the community.

Thank you for everything.

Quiddity (WMF) (留言贡献)

Thank you, all, for this positive feedback. :) Here is another post from Dannyh, which should help to clarify the previous message. (my apologies again for the large quantity of English):

Hi everyone, I want to clarify what the shift in priorities for the Collaboration team means for the work that we’ve done on this wiki. We’ve heard from people, on- and off-wiki, who are concerned that our team shifting to the Workflows project means that the Flow extension is done, and that using Flow on this wiki is going to leave people with a system that will become obsolete. I totally understand that concern -- the message I left here a couple days ago didn’t really make it clear, and I’m sorry about that.

First up: Flow is going to be maintained and supported, which means that we will fix bugs, and it’s our responsibility to make sure that the people who use it continue to have a good experience with it. We have some more fixes and a couple features that are going to be released this month -- including an optional beta feature that wikis can turn on if they want, which will allow people to turn on Flow for their own user talk pages.

About Workflows: This is a project that we talked about at Wikimania this summer. (Here’s a link to an updated version of the slides that we used.) Workflows are multi-step wiki discussions that end in a decision -- processes like Articles for deletion, Featured article nominations, or Administrators’ noticeboard requests. They all involve structured discussions, but each process is different, and every wiki has their own version. At Wikimania, we talked about this as the project that we were planning to work on starting early next year.

When it got to budget and planning time for the Foundation, we had to assess the relative value of the work that we were doing. What we ultimately decided was that starting on Workflows now was going to have a greater positive impact than making more discussion features. So the Workflows project moved from “3 to 6 months from now” to next month.

When it’s time to evaluate our progress in the future, the experiences that users have with the Flow beta feature will help to inform the choices that we make. As one of the wikis that’s been working really closely with us on the development, your ideas and feedback are really important to us.

I hope that helps people understand what’s going on; I’m sorry that we dropped surprising news on you earlier this week. Is there anything people would like to know about what we’re planning?


@Shangkuanlc, the opt-in beta feature (for a user talk page) is still in development, with details at Phab:T98270 and the associated GuidedTour at Phab:T108266. If this wiki's community discusses the feature and reaches a consensus to use it here, then it can be turned on when it is ready (planned for the end of September). There are 3 or 4 other wikis that are currently planning to use it.

Also, if this community would like to try using Flow in another location, such as a help desk or noticeboard, just let us know once you've come to a consensus. We've been tracking local discussions (and locations where Flow is used) in the table at Mw:Flow/Rollout.

Thanks again, and I hope you're having a good weekend.

Shangkuanlc (留言贡献)

Hi @Quiddity (WMF),

I see. Thank you for the explanation in a more detail and reassuring tone. I have translated your explanation, now let's wait for the workflow of the FLOW goes in zhwp

;)

Shangkuanlc (留言贡献)

Hi @Quiddity (WMF),

The discussion for a proposal of opt-in beta feature in Chinese Wikipedia has lots of Wikipedians participated, please see here. There are </nowiki>@Shizhao, @Liangent, @Antigng, @Irycatewi, @Jimmy Xu, @Carrotkit, @Cosine02, @Taiwania Justo, @Kanashimi, @Hat600, @小躍, and me had joined the conversation. Most of the Wikipedians are welcome the opt-in feature, but there are also two major concerns.

  1. According to Jimmy Xu, we have scripts that create comments on User talk pages, If the user joined the opt-in talk page, is it possible the scripts will not be functioning on his talk page?
  2. According to Antigng, if the user turn off the mentioning notice, then he/she may miss out the notice for deletion(提刪通知).

Also, we had a discussion on whether we should use Flow in a public village pump. But the string of the public Flow has only 2 Wikipedians replied, so it was inconclusive by the community consensus.

Hat600 (留言贡献)

Well, the 2 concerns are about the same thing.

Quiddity (WMF) (留言贡献)

Re: scripts/gadgets - there are technical instructions for script maintainers at mw:Flow/Architecture/API#Posting a new topic from on-wiki JavaScript, which if I understand correctly is a drop-in (or replacement?) code-block. (but I am not a dev. I can pass along any questions, or point devs towards IRC at #wikimedia-collaboration)

Re: bots - If they use pywikibot framework, then posting a new topic will work (per phab:T67119). For other bot frameworks, I need to check on details. (If anyone enjoys compiling tables of info, feel free to add a section for Zhwp to mw:Flow/Bots ;-)

MassMessage supports Flow.

Shangkuanlc (留言贡献)

Hello, @LNDDYL mentioned in the discussion that he thinks Flow does not support Wikipedia app. Is it true?

Quiddity (WMF) (留言贡献)

Yes, Flow is not currently working well with the app on Android or iOS. phab:T73754 has a brief description of the issues, but more details would be welcome.

胡葡萄 (留言贡献)

How can I apply Flow on my user talk page? Thanks

Shangkuanlc (留言贡献)
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