Flow/Mediawikiwiki LQT conversion process


 * See Topic "Starting conversion of LiquidThreads to Flow at mediawiki.org" for primary announcement and details. Additional ongoing discussion is at Project:Current issues and wikitech-l. There was also an IRC office hours on Monday 23 March.

The Collaboration team has been running test imports on the three most active LQT pages on Medawiki, and fixed the blockers that came up. (T90788. Example topic comparison: Flow vs LQT)

We’re planning to begin the conversion of actual pages as soon as possible after Monday, April 6th, starting with VisualEditor/Feedback.

Ideal timeline

 * Day 1 (Mon): Talk:Echo_(Notifications) and User talk:Mattflaschen ✅
 * Day 2 (Tues): 5 more pages (list below) ✅
 * User talk:Werdna, Talk:Flow Portal/Archive2, Talk:Collaboration, Extension talk:Flow, Extension talk:WikiLove.
 * Day 4 (Thurs): 25 more pages ✅
 * User_talk:Qgil-WMF, Talk:Search/status, Help_talk:CirrusSearch, Talk:Compatibility, Talk:MediaWiki_1.18, Extension talk:CirrusSearch, Extension talk:VisualEditor, Extension talk:Echo, VisualEditor_talk:Welcome, Extension talk:TemplateData, Extension talk:Lucene-search, Extension talk:MobileFrontend, Extension talk:Scribunto, Manual_talk:Installation_requirements, Manual_talk:Interwiki, Extension talk:Contribution Scores, Help_talk:Extension:Translate, Project_talk:WikiProject_Bug_Squad, Talk:Flow_Portal/Interactive_Prototype, Talk:LiquidThreads_3.0/Design, Talk:Athena, Talk:GlobalProfile/design, Talk:Groups/Proposals/Bug_Squad, Talk:Groups/San_Francisco
 * Day 8 (Mon): 250 more pages - list at P751 ✅
 * Random pages, as selected by the developers (probably by order of pageID), but excluding user_talk pages.
 * Day 10 (Wed): begin automatic conversion of the remainder ✅
 * Day 15 (Mon): Project:Support desk
 * VisualEditor/Feedback: hold until review by Communications & Editing teams.

Each deployment step depends on successfully completing the previous step, and resolving any critical issues that come up.

The pages to be converted earlier on, are selected based on diversity of size and namespace. We’ll be excluding most user_talk pages, from the early rounds. If you’d like to suggest changes to the list pages, please comment on the talkpage or contact Quiddity (WMF).

All LQT pages will be converted. There is not an opt-out process, because part of the aim is to remove Extension:LiquidThreads from this wiki, so that there's one less extension to (eventually) need to maintain, as well as cleaning up that aspect of the personal-bar at wikis that currently use it.

Problem scenario planning (?!)
If there are any problems in the early stages, the schedule will pause.

If there are serious unexpected issues with the conversion (such as data corruption or loss), a rollback will be possible, as all databases are preserved. The main difficulty is that each LQT thread’s current page will be replaced with a redirect to its new Flow location.

FAQs
(mostly copied from the original announcement)

LQT Threads that are currently on your watchlist, will still be watchlisted as Flow Topics. New Topics created at Flow Boards on your watchlist will appear in your Echo notifications, and you can choose whether or not to watchlist them.

The LQT namespaces will continue to exist. Links to posts/topics will redirect appropriately, and the LQT history will remain available at the original location, as well as being mirrored in the Flow history.

Page list
Quick numbers:
 * LQT is currently on 1,639 pages
 * There are currently ~52,000 individual posts.

This is a list of all LQT pages with 10 or more posts: