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.

This project has no formal deadline or plan.

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
 * Next: Community discussions regarding archiving SD boards on wikis.

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.