Structured Discussions/Project information/status

Last update on: 2013-01-monthly

2012-04-01
Brandon Harris and Andrew Garrett are doing an assessment of experiences learned in LiquidThreads 3.0.

2012-07-01
Official start date of Flow (messaging pages).

2012-07-monthly
Infrastructural work for Flow only until January 2013. Work there can be found in the Database_sharding page. Unrelated but there is an active discussion concerning the differences between Flow and LiquidThreads.

2012-08-monthly
Work on Flow will officially start in January. In the meantime, preparatory work will focus on Database sharding.

2012-09-monthly
Development work for Messaging on MediaWiki (code-named 'Flow') will start officially in January 2013 (after Echo first deployment). This new user-to-user messaging infrastructure tool will be developed by Wikimedia's editor engagement team, including Fabrice Florin, Vibha Bamba, Ryan Kaldari, Benny Situ, Matthias Mullie, Brandon Harris, Oliver Keyes, Howie Fung and Terry Chay. In the meantime, Performance engineering + Matthias Mullie are doing the underlying prep work with the RDB store (database sharding) on AFTv5 (and proper abstraction).

2012-11-monthly
The official start of Flow will follow Echo development. An initial team will be forming next month to explore solutions here.

2013-01-monthly
Flow entered the product design phase in early January. OPW intern Kim Schoonover began user research regarding how user-to-user talk pages are handled, and collected data about the difficulties that new (and existing) users have when using them. Engineering discussions started about potential back-end and scaling difficulties, the possible use of Wikidata's ContentHandler, and the evaluation of Wikia's MessageWall. A plan for community engagement was proposed and accepted, with a consultation about the problems faced planned for early February, with experienced and newer users alike.

2013-02-monthly
In February, user research concerning talk pages was analyzed and collated. Early designs were shown to members of the Board of Trustess, asking for their input. Jeff Atwood (from StackOverflow and Discourse) was brought in for a brain dump of his work. Design work was done on secondary "modules" as examples for how existing workflows can be rebuilt within the Flow system. Community engagement strategies saw the beginnings of implementation with the creation of a "Portal" for Flow discussion, which will be brought to three locations (mediawiki.org, meta, and the English Wikipedia).