Structured Discussions/FAQ

This page hopes to answer several frequently asked questions about Flow.

Is this replacing talk pages?
Yes.

Is this replacing wikitext?
No. As explained in the previous question, Flow is replacing talk pages. Note that while the prototype does not support wikitext, the final product will.

Can I Opt-Out?
In the first phase of deployment, you'll have to opt in. New users will be automatically be given Flow but existing users will have to choose to upgrade.

Eventually, we'll probably get more aggressive about asking people to upgrade, and finally (at some nebulous time in the future), we'll auto-upgrade everyone.

This will be a long-term process. It won't happen tomorrow or probably even within the year.

What happens to my old talk page?
It will be archived off and saved. There will be a link to it from your Board.

Can I turn my current talk page discussions into Flow discussions?
This is a theoretical possibility but a practical impossibility. As you know, wikitext is extremely difficult to parse without human intervention (hence the difficulty with developing a VisualEditor).

The Foundation will likely not spend engineering dollars on developing a solution for this. Volunteer developers might, however.

Will there be avatars?
The short-term answer is "no."

The long-term answer is "possibly." Using avatars on Wikimedia projects brings up several problems, not the least of which is "using a free-use image on a project that doesn't allow free-use content." There are studies that show that avatars help to make conversations less hostile (they instill empathy). It's something we'll be looking at, but it's also not something that will happen from out of nowhere.

What is the relationship to LiquidThreads?
Flow is an independent project from LiquidThreads and is being designed and built from scratch. Users of both systems will find that there are many similar concepts, but these things fall naturally out of the idea of a "discussion system".

The data model for the aborted LiquidThreads 3.0 project will likely be used (because it's a good data model), and we might experiment with a fork of LQT for making rapid prototypes, but that's about it.

Why not use LiquidThreads?
LiquidThreads (LQT) was an early attempt at creating a structured discussion system. It has both strengths and weaknesses. After exploration and discussion, LQT was abandoned as a solution going forward for several reasons.

First, LiquidThreads has incredibly poor performance, especially when run at scale. This has to do with the way that individual comments or posts are stored, parsed, rendered, cached, and assembled. If a thread has 50 responses, and the user reading it is logged in, then all 50 responses must be re-rendered, parsed, and assembled every time. There is no way to cache them. This is terribly slow.

Second, Flow is designed to be interwiki from the beginning. This requires that it have a completely different data model (one that supports globally unique identifiers). LiquidThreads cannot (and could never) provide support for this.

Third, Flow is designed to be "future proof". Since the roadmap for Wikimedia projects is heavily invested around the VisualEditor, the data that Flow creates must be able to work with that. "Upgrading" LiquidThreads would require that we provide an agonizing level of backwards compatibility.

Finally, LiquidThreads was only designed to be a "discussion system" and as such is hamstrung by being less flexible than is required for discussions on Wikimedia projects. Flow is designed to be a "workflow facilitation system". The difference may seem subtle on the surface but deeper examination into the way various Wikimedia projects use the collaboration space will quickly show that simple forum software is insufficient to meet the needs of the community. In fact, very few discussions actually match the pure "conversation" model that LiquidThreads is designed to answer. Flow is designed to be flexible with regards to workflows and collaboration techniques in a way that LQT could never be.

Will we be able to upgrade from LiquidThreads to Flow?
This is currently planned. We want to have a forward migration path for sites using LiquidThreads because we have sunsetted LQT.

Sadly, we live in the real world, so this support may be cut from our feature set. That doesn't mean that volunteer developers won't make it happen, though.

What happens to my custom signature?
It's probably going to go away, at least in the early versions. One of the things that people find difficulty with is knowing who said what, and custom signatures interfere with that a great deal.

We'll probably allow for a "display name" so that you don't show up as your official username if you don't want to, but we won't allow for custom HTML, wikitext, or templates in the signature. (Transcluding templates is forbidden at the English Wikipedia anyway.)

What about IP/Anonymous Editors?
Anonymous editors will show up just like they always have. They will have boards just like other users.

They probably won't have feeds, though. Feeds are dependent on saved data.

Why don't we use a pre-built system, like PHPBB or Discourse?
The simple answer is that "they won't cut it". The complex answer is that pre-built systems are designed around singular use cases, and Wikimedia projects do not have "singular" use cases. On the English Wikipedia alone, the following are discussions that take totally different forms:


 * User talk
 * Article talk
 * Requests for Comment
 * Request for Adminship
 * Deletion discussions
 * Merge discussions
 * Village pump discussions
 * AN/I
 * Arbcom cases

The list goes on and on. A singular package will not and cannot cover these cases. So we have to build our own.

Will there be a place for unsigned information like WikiProject banners?
Yes.