Structured Discussions/Deprecation

StructuredDiscussions (SD - Flow) is used on a few wikis. This extension is not maintained. DiscussionTools (DT) is the default discussion system on wikis now.

The Growth team (SD maintainers) and the Editing team (DT maintainers) have started thinking about how to deprecate StructuredDiscussions (and possibly LiquidThreads) and replace them with DiscussionTools.

The idea is to have DiscussionTools provide equivalent features of what StructuredDiscussions offers, so that current SD users would switch to DT.

Project updates

 * 2022-06-08: first internal document by Kosta Harlan (Staff software engineer, Growth team) and Benoît Evellin (Community Relations Specialist, attached to the Growth team) on sunsetting SD
 * 2023-03-14: first meeting with Growth and Editing about SD deprecation
 * 2023-03-14: Comparison table of the two tools.
 * 2023-03-29: creation of the project page
 * 2023-09: Data on usage of StructuredDiscussions
 * 2023-11, 2023-12: Community discussions regarding archiving SD boards on wikis.

Community information regarding the depreciation
The Wikimedia Foundation working on changes to how IP editing is handled: IP Editing: Privacy Enhancement and Abuse Mitigation. Temporary accounts for unregistered editors will be a new type of user account. This requires changing how the features we use to contribute to the wikis' work.

This work concerns all features, and it raises some challenges. The case of StructuredDiscussions (also known as “SD” or “Flow”) is one of them. This extension is used at a few wikis, that are progressively contacted in November and December 2023. Flow is a complex piece of software that was never quite finished, fits poorly into the MediaWiki architecture, and creates a significant number of technical errors.

We considered several options to adapt StructuredDiscusions: a full adaptation; a partial adaptation where Temp accounts can respond but not create new conversations. All of them would take a lot of time and effort for a short-term benefit. Also, the Wikimedia Foundation's long-term plan is to remove StructuredDiscusions from the wikis, mainly due to the maintenance cost. As a consequence, we prefer to avoid adapting StructuredDiscussions to Temporary accounts.

We take the opportunity of the work around Temporary accounts to question the concerned communities regarding the future of StructuredDiscusions.

Discussion tools are the replacement for StructuredDiscusions. They are the default discussion system at all wikis. They allow anyone to start, reply or subscribe to a conversation. They provide a visual experience on wikitext-based conversations, and they cover the vast majority of features StructuredDiscusions offer.

The goal with this conversation is to respond to community's questions regarding the archival of StructuredDiscussions.

The idea is to proceed in two stages:


 * 1) discussion pages using SD are archived as subpages. They are replaced by a classic discussion page. In this way, the most active pages will already be ready when we proceed to step 2.
 * 2) SD are removed from the wiki. Existing pages (including archived ones) will be converted to a format yet to be defined.

Data on usage
In August 2023, on average:


 * DiscussionTools is used about 18,780 times per day.
 * Flow is used about 250 times per day, mainly at French Wikipedia.
 * LiquidThreads is used less than once per day.