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)
 * First, I think there may be some confusion as to what software development defines the idiom "Minimum Viable Product" and how people are perceiving it. We are using it in the software engineering sense:  the smallest amount of work required to create functional software that works.  It's not the complete product (which could possibly take years to finish).  It's the smallest group of features possible to make it usable for the first release.  And the first release isn't targeted at articles, or user talk. It's got a very specific focus.
 * Second, I'll point out that Flow will support a great deal of wikitext natively (most, in fact). We've discussed this before and provided examples.  Flow posts will be run through Parsoid.  This is perhaps not a very popular design decision with several members of the community but we believe it is essential to the mission statement of the Wikimedia Foundation:
 * The mission of the Wikimedia Foundation is to empower and engage people around the world to collect and develop educational content under a free license or in the public domain, and to disseminate it effectively and globally. (emphasis mine)
 * The fact is that talk pages - as they currently exist - do not empower or engage people. In fact, they do the exact opposite, which is why we are working to fix them.  We will not be spending resources (money and time) to replicate broken technology. If you disagree that talk pages are broken - if you think they work just fine for empowering and engaging people - then I'm afraid there isn't much use in further conversation along these lines because it won't be productive.
 * Third, we are planning on integrating "collaborative development" areas into Flow to address the issue of multiple editors working on developing articles. I do not believe that it is currently in the MVP (I think it is slated for release 2), but I may be wrong.
 * Fourth, whether or not Flow is deployed to an individual wiki is largely outside of the consensus of the local wiki. The development and deployment of Flow has been mandated by the board of trustees.  There really isn't a productive conversation to be had with threats about "not allowing us to deploy"; that's a battleground mentality that can quickly turn toxic. If your concern is that we will simply "turn it on everywhere at once" I can assure that will not happen; the rollout is going to be painfully slow.
 * Fifth, if you have any specific concerns regarding what wikitext may or may not be supported, it would help us to see examples, if you can provide them.
 * Thanks! --Jorm (WMF) (talk) 20:23, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Re: the first point - Note that the new/current plan is to make the first release at just a few wikiprojects (See w:Wikipedia:Flow). That's it. It's being discussed with the communities and seeing who is willing to host the initial tests. –Quiddity (talk) 20:38, 9 September 2013 (UTC)
 * This won't do. I hereby declare Flow to be dead. Don't invest further time and money into it. And I doubt you assessment regarding the existing talk pages. They are wikis. They are basic, maybe even primitive. They are very hands on and that makes them incredibly powerful. Sure, with that power there are dangers. If you have a nail gun, you can shoot yourself into the foot. But I prefer a wiki talk page over every forum software, I've ever seen. And I don't know anyone who did not get our talk pages. Maybe they made a few mistakes in their early days but that's OK. rgds --H-stt (talk) 14:45, 10 September 2013 (UTC)
 * I'm sorry this couldn't be productive. Perhaps you'll change your mind in the future, after having seen the software in action.--Jorm (WMF) (talk) 15:10, 10 September 2013 (UTC)


 * I'm sorry. Please don't complain, if this project ends like a number of other recent developments by the WMF. rgds --H-stt (talk) 16:50, 11 September 2013 (UTC)
 * Re: "I don't know anyone who did not get our talk pages" - If I might suggest, watching a couple of the videos and reading the conclusions at Flow_Portal/Research/User_Test_Data, and also this Wikimania video (See the 90 second Flow specific part starting at 49:18, but also the VE clip that runs from 57:00 until 60:30), is interesting and insightful.
 * I've also personally introduced many friends, acquaintances, and colleagues, to editing, and only the computer-savvy people ever became comfortable with our wiki-discussions. There is much to like about the free-form wiki system we use, but there are also a lot of drawbacks, that dissuade a lot of otherwise-intelligent people from ever becoming editors. (Eg. the simple examples in those videos I linked, or more complex workflow examples like the painfully convoluted multistep process that many of our common tasks require, like AfD). The image-upload process has been overhauled to be a lot less painful, over the past few years, but many other tasks are still vastly more complex than they need to be. Food for thought, at least. –Quiddity (talk) 18:12, 11 September 2013 (UTC)