Tema de Viquipèdia Discussió:Flow

(sorry for posting in English...)

Hi everyone,

I want to let you know about some changes to the plan for Flow development. I'm going to post the official message about it below, but here's what's important for Catalan:

We're going to stop active development on Flow after September, so the team can work on a Workflows feature. There are a couple Flow feature changes coming this month, including an opt-in Beta feature so that people can turn Flow on for their own user talk pages. Then in October, we're going to focus on Workflows. Flow is still going to be supported and maintained.

Here's the longer message, and I'm happy to talk if you want to know more.

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While initial announcements about Flow said that it would be a universal replacement for talk pages, the features that were ultimately built into Flow were specifically forum-style group discussion tools. But article and project talk pages are used for a number of important and complex processes that those tools aren't able to handle, making Flow unsuitable for deployment on those kinds of pages.

To better address the needs of our core contributors, we're now focusing our strategy on the curation, collaboration, and admin processes that take place on a variety of pages. Many of these processes use complex workarounds -- templates, categories, transclusions, and lots of instructions -- that turn blank wikitext talk pages into structured workflows. There are gadgets and user scripts on the larger wikis to help with some of these workflows, but these tools aren't standardized or universally available.

As these workflows grow in complexity, they become more difficult for the next generation of editors to learn and use. This has increased the workload on the people who maintain those systems today. Complex workflows are also difficult to adapt to other languages, because a wiki with thousands of articles may not need the kind of complexity that comes with managing a wiki with millions of articles. We've talked about this kind of structured workflow support at Wikimania, in user research sessions, and on wikis. It's an important area that needs a lot of discussion, exploration, and work.

Starting in October, Flow will not be in active development, as we shift the team's focus to these other priorities. We'll be helping core contributors reduce the stress of an ever-growing workload, and helping the next generation of contributors participate in those processes. Further development on these projects will be driven by the needs expressed by wiki communities.

Flow will be maintained and supported, and communities that are excited about Flow discussions will be able to use it. There are places where the discussion features are working well, with communities that are enthusiastic about them: on user talk pages, help pages, and forum/village pump-style discussion spaces. By the end of September, we'll have an opt-in Beta feature available to communities that want it, allowing users to enable Flow on their own user talk pages.

I'm sure people will want to know more about these projects, and we're looking forward to those conversations. We'll be reaching out for lots of input and feedback over the coming months.

T​o clarify: Starting in October, Flow will be maintained; it's not being abandoned. Further work on the discussion system will need to be driven by communities voicing their desire for further work on it.

Hi everyone, I want to clarify what the shift in priorities for the Collaboration team means for the work that we’ve done with this wiki. We’ve heard from people, on- and off-wiki, who are concerned that our team shifting to the Workflows project means that the Flow extension is done, and that using Flow on this wiki is going to leave people with a system that will become obsolete. I totally understand that concern -- the message I left here a couple days ago didn’t really make it clear, and I’m sorry about that.

First up: Flow is going to be maintained and supported, which means that we will fix bugs, and it’s our responsibility to make sure that the people who use it continue to have a good experience with it. We have some more fixes and a couple features that are going to be released this month -- including an optional beta feature that wikis can turn on if they want, which will allow people to turn on Flow for their own user talk pages.

About Workflows: This is a project that we talked about at Wikimania this summer. (Here’s a link to an updated version of the slides that we used.) Workflows are multi-step wiki discussions that end in a decision -- processes like Articles for deletion, Featured article nominations, or Administrators’ noticeboard requests. They all involve structured discussions, but each process is different, and every wiki has their own version. At Wikimania, we talked about this as the project that we were planning to work on starting early next year.

When it got to budget and planning time for the Foundation, we had to assess the relative value of the work that we were doing. What we ultimately decided was that starting on Workflows now was going to have a greater positive impact than making more discussion features. So the Workflows project moved from “3 to 6 months from now” to next month.

When it’s time to evaluate our progress in the future, the experiences that users have with the Flow beta feature will help to inform the choices that we make. As one of the wikis that’s been working really closely with us on the development, your ideas and feedback are really important to us.

If there are pages currently using Flow and you don’t think the existing feature set is enough to keep using it during the time that we're working on Workflows, we can archive the Flow page for you. You can let us know what you want to do.

I hope that helps people understand what’s going on; I’m sorry that we dropped surprising news on you earlier this week. Is there anything people would like to know about what we’re planning?