Structured Discussions/Request Structured Discussions on a page

This page describes the procedure of requesting Structured Discussions on a Wikimedia project.

Important notes

 * 1) It is difficult to remove Structured Discussions once it is installed (see T186463). You may deactivate it, but not completely uninstall it currently. So it is not encouraged to enable Structured Discussions only on some trial/sandbox pages. You should use Talk:Sandbox or Test Wikipedia if you only want to test this feature.
 * 2) If your wiki are using gadgets, user scripts or other tools extensively, please note they may be incompatible with Structured Discussions. (e.g. The Twinkle gadget in enwiki does not support Structured Discussions, and should be modified to adapt such talk pages.) Therefore, you may miss some automated messages until the bot-writers adopt Structured Discussions (see T107093 and related tasks). In addition, many large community, including English Wikipedia and Wikimedia Commons, which uses scripts and bots extensively, choosed not to use Structured Discussions.
 * 3) Wikimedia is no longer actively promoting Structured Discussions unless the community wants it. A completely new system might be developed in the future; see Talk pages consultation 2019.

Procedures
You may enable Structured Discussions on:
 * 1) One or more specific pages (e.g. help desk, wikiproject, village pump... );
 * 2) One or more namespaces (e.g. all article talk pages);
 * 3) User talk pages of all users who want to have Flow on their talk page (through a Beta feature).

For request not of the first type, you should create a task at Phabricator after reaching a community consensus.

For request of the first type:
 * 1) Check whether Structured Discussions is enabled in your wiki. View Special:EnableStructuredDiscussions in your wiki, if you find "No such special page", then Structured Discussions is not installed. You may request it to be installed at Phabricator after a consensus.
 * 2) If you can enable Structured Discussions on a page, you are done. You may ask an administrator to enable Structured Discussions on a page if they can. Administrators can create Structured Discussions Boards if your wiki have enabled Structured Discussions on one or more namespaces or as Beta feature. You may also request to allow a specific user group to enable Structured Discussions as a configuration change.
 * 3) If administrators can not enable Structured Discussions, or there're no active administrators, you may request to enable Structured Discussions by a steward at Steward_requests/Miscellaneous (after a discussion).

Note there is no activations on-request on user talk pages anymore: all wikis have now to use the Beta feature if they want to have Structured Discussions on user talk pages. You can start a discussion on your wiki to get community consensus to have it enabled.

It's encouraged to contact the Global collaboration team liaison to keep the development team aware of the decision process. Any questions may also be forwarded to the team.

Information on first use of Structured Discussions
For the first use of Structured Discussions at a wiki, the developers need this information:
 * If any, the exact name of the local discussion & feedback page, e.g. Wikipedia_talk:Structured_Discussions or Discussion_Wikipédia:Discussions_Structurées. However, we recommend to use the global feedback page at Talk:Structured Discussions where you can post in any language.
 * The exact name of a "sandbox" page, where the community would like to test out Structured Discussions, e.g. Structured Discussions/Sandbox or Viquipèdia_Discussió:Structured_Discussions/proves, useful for trials and check for translations
 * What word to use for the "Topic" namespace and check if that name is not used (it is possible to archive old contents)

You may have to check for translations in the language(s) used in your wiki, if you think you need them. It is up to your community to know what are their needs. The following can be translated:


 * the documentation (that page first),
 * Structured Discussions interface messages (listed as ext-flow) on TranslateWiki (the many MediaWiki:Apihelp-... messages can be safely ignored).
 * If you consider to convert a whole namespace to Structured Discussions for good, please check that list.