Talk:Flow Portal/MVP

Sounds promising
I think this is a great way to pilot Flow, and potentially a boon for WikiProjects (which are dear to my heart). A couple of questions/suggestions/crazy ideas:
 * will Flow play nicely with archiving bots, like MiszaBot?
 * Thanks for reminding me that I hadn't covered archiving (yet) :) I've added a note about that and search in the doc. The answer to your specific question is that manual or bot archiving in the current wiki way may not make sense with a discussion feature that has infinite scroll capability – we could always show the most recent discussions on top and lazy-load older ones below, making them accessible via scrolling. That + a robust search feature may be far more useful than creating static, arbitrarily defined archives via a bot. If I'm looking for a particular discussion, being able to search for all discussions that match certain keywords, users, or date ranges would be far more useful than a list of archived discussions 1-23,234.


 * this is way out of scope for MVP, but have you considered adding an optional "resolved" button for threads? A lot of project_talk posts are more like bug tickets than conversations.
 * I actually did consider that feature for the MVP! It would obviously be super useful. What stopped me was the fact that we have two similar and somewhat overlapping feature ideas for this kind of workflow: a "resolved" button, which could be on a per-comment basis, and a "closed" button, which could collapse the entire closed topic and all associated comments and replace it with a brief summary (e.g., "SNOW close of this RfC to change n-dashes to m-dashes in Nickelback articles"). I think it might be good to let users play with the prototype and decide which of these things they want most for WikiProject discussions (whether it's one or both).


 * If you're looking for projects to test this out on, I would be happy to suggest coordinators to reach out to.
 * Yes! Suggestions welcome :)
 * +1, very happy you guys are starting with Wikiprojects! I've been lobbying Jorm to beta test Flow on Teahouse for ages, and J-Mo has convinced me that TH is a WikiProject, so yippee. But the Q&A forum is not a talk page...possible to still try something out there? Or perhaps host lounge talk page for experienced TH discussion, if Q&A is too much trouble to begin with. Sbouterse (WMF) (talk)

Apologies if any of this is covered elsewhere in the Flow doc. Jmorgan (WMF) (talk) 23:42, 20 August 2013 (UTC)


 * Thanks for the feedback, J-mo! In-line replies to your queries above ^ Maryana (WMF) (talk) 00:36, 21 August 2013 (UTC)

This is out of scope here, but I don't know the page where it would in scope: Is the en.Wikipedia implementation of succession boxes compatible with Parsoid. My understanding is that it isn't, because the table start is in the "S-start" template and the table end is in the "S-end" template, with other templates in between. Arthur Rubin en.Wiki (talken.Wiki) 02:25, 22 August 2013 (UTC)
 * Arthur Rubin, I'm not 100% sure, but after seeing all the amazingly complex things Parsoid handles comfortably already, my gut says those'll probably be fine. Check out this page, which documents the current limitations to Parsoid. Some of this stuff is so little-used that there doesn't seem to be a lot of impetus to fix it, but other things are actively being worked on and will get fixed soon. If S-start/S-end templates fall under any of those unsupported categories, I'd suggest leaving a note on the talk page about them, so the visibility of the issue can be raised to the devs. Maryana (WMF) (talk) 03:12, 22 August 2013 (UTC)

Please react to the discussion on en-WP
Hi, the recent discussions at en:Wikipedia talk:Flow mentioned quite a number of points that must be considered here, as they are minimum viable product specs for Flow to get anything resembling acceptance by the editing community.

To be blunt:
 * We will not allow a roll out even for onwiki testing of any tool that does not allow real collaboration on texts! Please read my last sentence again. If you don't understand why this is important, please read it once more. The concept of Flow as individual snippets that are owned by the respective author and can't be edited by anyone else, is not compatible with the idea of a Wiki and therefore not acceptable. We need collaboration in discussions just as we need it in the article name space.
 * And we need full rendering of each and every valid Wikicode in discussions. Maybe you don't know about that, but both article talk pages, as user talk pages, both have the primary purpose of discussing improvements to articles. All of Wikipedia is about improving articles. Therefore those talk pages need to be able to render examples and snippets from actual articles. And that includes ugly CSS-hacks and the misappropriation of templates to name only two challenges. Using Parsoid only won't do.

If that means you have to start over and forget everything you did so far, well, better now than in one years time when your code is (almost) finished but we will not allow it on our Wikipedias. rgds --H-stt (talk) 12:06, 9 September 2013 (UTC)