Structured Discussions/Project information/status

Last update on: 2013-01-monthly

2012-04-01
Brandon Harris and Andrew Garrett are doing an assessment of experiences learned in LiquidThreads 3.0.

2012-07-01
Official start date of Flow (messaging pages).

2012-07-monthly
Infrastructural work for Flow only until January 2013. Work there can be found in the Database_sharding page. Unrelated but there is an active discussion concerning the differences between Flow and LiquidThreads.

2012-08-monthly
Work on Flow will officially start in January. In the meantime, preparatory work will focus on Database sharding.

2012-09-monthly
Development work for Messaging on MediaWiki (code-named 'Flow') will start officially in January 2013 (after Echo first deployment). This new user-to-user messaging infrastructure tool will be developed by Wikimedia's editor engagement team, including Fabrice Florin, Vibha Bamba, Ryan Kaldari, Benny Situ, Matthias Mullie, Brandon Harris, Oliver Keyes, Howie Fung and Terry Chay. In the meantime, Performance engineering + Matthias Mullie are doing the underlying prep work with the RDB store (database sharding) on AFTv5 (and proper abstraction).

2012-11-monthly
The official start of Flow will follow Echo development. An initial team will be forming next month to explore solutions here.

2013-01-monthly
Flow entered the product design phase in early January. Mid-month saw Kim Schoonover begin user research regarding how user-to-user talk pages are handled and collecting data about the difficulties that new (and existing) users have when using them. Engineering discussions were opened about potential back-end and scaling difficulties, possible use of Wikidata ContentHandler patch, and evaluation of Wikia's MessageWall. A plan for community engagement was proposed and accepted, with engagement about the problems faced planned for early February with inexperienced and experienced users alike.