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While creating a deletion request at Wikimedia Commons (it works similar to the Articles for deletion process here, with individual pages created for each request), I wondered how an implementation of Flow for talk pages would affect participation in deletion discussions. The deletion process here or at Commons is outside of talk space - so it wouldn't necessarily be directly affected by Flow, I suppose. But if regular talk would change to Flow and more casual users would only be familiar with the Flow way of commenting, couldn't that lead to even less participiation by lesser experienced users in areas such as deletion requests? On the other hand, I can hardly imagine how the AfD process should be converted to use Flow. Is this something already discussed somewhere? Gestumblindi ( talk) 20:48, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
This will be another fiasco like Media Viewer if we don't get more eyes on it. It seems that hardly anyone has really looked at this and tried it out. Crazy idea #47815: Throw it on a very heavily used page now, to ensure that everyone sees it and uses it, for a month or so. More eyes, more comments = better results. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 05:44, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
Your idea is being tested on the French, at fr:Wikipédia:Forum des nouveaux/Flow. Looking at the history, it is clear that a lot of it is simply not visible. The page looks more like a vandal magnet than anything else. Looking there, I note other problems apart from thos eI listed above, like: the "what links here" page doesn't work (and the reverse, something that is linked on a Flow page, shows up as "Sujet:S6uomx6azjq9rtvw", not as "Wikipédia:Forum des nouveaux/Flow", making it impossible to find some discussion in this way when there are quite a few links); the relative timestamps don't change to absolute ones if you change the sorting of the table (from newest to most recently active). And infinite scrolling sucks badly. Trying to get to the end of the page takes ages and lots of clicks. And search doesn't work: not the internal search engine (not at all), and obviously browser-search only works on the visible part of the Flow page, not on the hidden older topics. There is a discussion on "lagomorphe" on that Flow page, but you can't find it.
All these things have been known for ages, and are serious problems. No idea why they still insist on rolling this out, but at least they are bothering other wikipedia versions for a change. Rolling the current version out here, even if it has the support of some WMF employees, some people who have received grants from the WMF, and a few seslect uninvolved editors, will with near-certainty lead to another enwiki-WMF clash, and that is one thing both can do without. Fram ( talk) 08:29, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
Ok, a bad way to get more testers (I did call my own idea crazy, you know). That said, I don't want to see a repeat of the Media Viewer fiasco. I think once the developers reach a certain point, they should maybe run an RfC simply asking "Should the Wikimedia Foundation continue to develop this software?" That way, if everyone's gonna hate it, they stop earlier in the process, not waste development time and dollars, and not piss of the editing communities. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 15:34, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
I fully support this sort of test, but I support putting it on the page for Gamergate, or Global Warming, or any major religion, or the latest article on white-cop-kills-unarmed-black-youth, or something resembling Expelled:_No_Intelligence_Allowed when it was a fresh release. I want the WMF to see the complete obliteration of article development when mobs of non-editors are on-ramped into our work areas. Alsee ( talk) 01:51, 7 December 2014 (UTC)
So, I'm doing more brainstorming here, and this is the result this time: User:Oiyarbepsy/Wikitalk and Flow:The Best of Both Worlds. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 05:38, 6 December 2014 (UTC)
I think one of the problems in discussions like the one above is that we don't always mean the same thing when we talk about Flow:
I think we could have a more constructive discussion if we tried harder to make clear what we're talking about, and if we would as far as possible separate the discussion about technical points like data models and software features from the political ones like who does the programming and who decides what software is deployed where. — HHHIPPO 23:26, 7 December 2014 (UTC)
In July, User:Quiddity (WMF) (I presume) moved Topic: The Washington & Jefferson College Review to Topic- The Washington & Jefferson College Review. However, this doesn't show up in the page history. Can this kind of thing please be avoided? Things which don't appear in the history (except real oversight issues) create mistrust and confusion.
Would it be a technical issue if the page was moved to Topic : The Washington & Jefferson College Review? This would more closely resemble the correct title.
Oh, and by the way, if you now search for the original title, you get a nice pink error: [cca66461] 2014-12-10 15:32:57: Fatal exception of type Flow\Exception\InvalidInputException. Considering that the links to the moved page were only corrected nearly two months after the page move, quite a few people mauy have encountered this... Fram ( talk) 15:36, 10 December 2014 (UTC)
Does one need to (or should one) enable the "Automatically enable all new beta features" option to begin using this? I'm hesitant to just jump in there without asking first, but I would like to be helpful in some way with regard to this project if possible, as it evolves. DonaldKronos ( talk) 07:13, 29 December 2014 (UTC)
Lila Tretikov has made an interesting statement about Flow at her talk page. ( Permalink to discussion). Diego ( talk) 14:19, 7 January 2015 (UTC)
This is a major discussion page about Flow, so I thought Flow would be enabled on this page. -- t numbermaniac c 05:13, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
VisualEditor 2: Electric Boogaloo anyone? -- DSA510 Pls No AndN 06:43, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
@ Quiddity (WMF):, you have a dead link of the WP:Flow page. It appears that it's supposed to be a link to your testwiki talk page demonstrating templates or something, but it doesn't work properly. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 04:32, 10 March 2015 (UTC)
The text edit box takes wikimarkup, but if your goal is a modern UI, it would be nice to have a toolbar for bold, italic, wikilink, hyperlink, special chars, insert media, and so on. SageGreenRider ( talk) 02:12, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
If you want an example of how complicated talk pages can become, take a look into the Total Perspective Vortex at Talk:Phineas Gage. ;-) — Preceding unsigned comment added by SageGreenRider ( talk • contribs) 02:30, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
Back on topic, once Flow is actually a completed product (it's not), as I see it, most of Alsee's complaints would be satisfied by adding a "wikiview" button to Flow pages that would generate a wikitext version usable by bots and scripts and the like. 99.9% of our talk page functions will work problem-free with Flow simply by introducing sub-sections. But there are so many probably with using a wikimodel for discussions, that something's gotta give. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 12:45, 15 April 2015 (UTC)
A new indentation & threading model has been deployed in today's update. Here's a detailed explanation about this from DannyH, including a comparison with the wikitext indentation habits and traditions (and how confusing those "rules" are for almost all newcomers, especially in large threads), and links to past-discussions, phabricator, and some related ideas.
The short-version (an excerpt) is:
In this new version: If you're replying to the most recent post, then your reply just lines up under the previous message. A two-person back and forth conversation just looks flat, and the visual separation is noted with the user name and timestamp.
If you're specifically replying to a previous post, then your reply creates an indented tangent. If everybody responding on that tangent replies to the last message in that subthread, then it'll stay at the same indentation level. But if someone replies to an older message within the subthread, then that creates a third indentation level. It's set to a maximum of 8 possible indentation levels, and we just stop it there because there's a point where you can't fit a lot of text in each line.
The big idea of the new system is that the indentation should actually mean something. You should be able to tell the difference between a simple conversation and a complicated conversation at a glance, and using indented tangents helps you to spot the places in a conversation where there's a disagreement or a deeper level of detail.
A few editors have said they like it, but it wasn't clear to them how it was meant to work, until they'd read this explanation. Please discuss it here and in the topic linked above, and let the team know what suggestions/requests/concerns/ideas you have. Thank you! Quiddity (WMF) ( talk) 23:32, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
Here I've talked a little about the relative advantages and disadvantages of the new Flow indentation vs the old talk page convention (it's not really part of mediawiki, just a style guideline). In summary, the new threading model doesn't create as many deep indentation levels, and the conversation can run much longer without requiring indentation tricks; with the new model I wouldn't have needed the above {{ outdent}} template to return the conversation to a sane left margin.
In fact, the threading model is independent of the software platform, and could be perfectly used on wikitext as well. I have posted here an example of this very conversation under the current Flow threading model, and here with the proposed refinement (they only differ in the order of the last three posts). Can you see how the model may be simpler to understand to a person reading Talk pages for the first time? Diego ( talk) 09:41, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
P.S. Moreover, suppose now DannyH wants to make a direct reply to your latest post above (21:40, 20 April 2015). What is the expected position where he should place it? In both versions of the new model there's a definite position where such reply should be placed, and the conversation can grow almost indefinitely following a consistent set of rules; but in the current wikitext model, it's not clear how one should reply directly to a nested post and keep the conversation growing after someone uses an {{ outdent}}. Diego ( talk) 11:23, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
Still, I am not sure I would have guessed what that horizontal line means that soon (perhaps in five minutes), if I was not a participant of the discussion...Same thing could be said of the outdent line, or placing two posts one below the other at the same indentation level, which have particular meanings in the current convention that are not obvious. Any system will have edge cases which need to be explained - the test for knowing if a system is intuitive is whether you need to explain the simple, most common case before it can be understood. Diego ( talk) 23:16, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
Related to the comments above and elsewhere, this page will have Flow enabled on Wednesday (PDT afternoon). It will follow the usual rollout process, with the current contents being archived to the latest subpage archive, and the current header templates being copied across. I'll also update the header templates once Flow is enabled. Quiddity (WMF) ( talk) 08:11, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
@ Quiddity (WMF): What?!?! After many extensive discussions of Flow on the Executive Director's talk page she told us Flow was on hold and agreed with our objections.
Last month I double-checked and asked her to clarify the situation:
Hi, we have paused any but requested rollouts of Flow, but we have not resolved yet how the mission might be changed -- hence the page has not changed yet. To the guest above: great to hear your interest in helping us build wikis. You can find more info here (if you have not done so already): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 00:21, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
I am not aware of the Community establishing a Consensus to request Flow here. Alsee ( talk) 09:06, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
There are some important use cases that Flow doesn't handle yet, like... most workflows.-- That's more than some. 163.1.120.19 ( talk) 21:38, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
Using Flow on this page is a great way to ensure that people who refuse to use Flow pages (such as myself) will be excluded. I already saw some notification about a Flow survey thingie on MediaWiki and didn't participate in that either for the same reason. As per the above, we don't want this here and we have enough pages to test it on. ekips39❦ talk 23:30, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
Feedback heard, loud and clear. I mistakenly read the earlier thread as being open to the possibility of testing it here; I'll make sure to ask next time, per the standard Flow rollout process. For what it's worth, many other wikis are happily testing Flow, and requesting specific features and tweaks in order to deploy it to more pages at their wikis, e.g. The Catalan Wikipedia has Flow at all their Village Pumps now, and is discussing where else they'd like to try it next; and the French Wikipedia has been using Flow at a sub-page of their Newcomers Help Desk for a few months, and the devs are preparing the remaining features necessary to migrate Frwiki's main Newcomers Help Desk over to Flow. There are test pages at, and ongoing discussions with, the Portuguese, Hebrew, Russian, Chinese, Punjabi, and Telugu Wikipedias. Development is going steadily towards the use-cases that editors ask for, as well as further improvements of the backend and the feeds. Anyway, thanks to the folk who offered constructive feedback, and sorry again that I let my enthusiasm overwhelm my usual caution, before posting the original plan. Quiddity (WMF) ( talk) 19:43, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
When a thread on the Developer test page had its name changed, the notification was incorrect. As can be seen here, it showed the name which it was changed to twice, instead of the name which was changed from and the name which it was changed to once each. Origamite ⓣ ⓒ 15:12, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
The page header is completely covering the discussions, except a tiny sliver on the left. I can click in the text boxes, but everything else is hidden under the header, including the all-important post button. Upon loading the page, for a split second it shows the header on the right of the discussion board, but it almost instantly expands to cover everything up.
I'm using Chrome on Win8. I have the user script for adjusting the width of the discussion board area. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 14:24, 5 June 2015 (UTC)
I just tried to correct a minor misprint ("notofication") on the head of Wikipedia talk:Flow/Developer test page (twice). This didn't work. There was no warning or reservation; I got up an edit box, did the edit, and seemingly saved it; but it doesn't take. There seems to be a bug, either in some inbuilt restriction of the right to edit not being displayed, or in the saving process.
If indeed the possibilities to edit the page header is to be restricted (e. g. to Flow developers or to enwiki administrators) then there should be a warning about this, or at least not seem to be edit possibilities. Best, JoergenB ( talk) 19:55, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
Is there any way to watchlist an entire page with Flow instead of just a single topic? I tried watchlisting Wikipedia_talk:Flow/Test_page and it only adds a single topic, not the whole page. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? Short Brigade Harvester Boris ( talk) 20:16, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
For Flow pages, there are two sets of stars. The star up next to the new topic button (in the usual location) will watch the entire page. The stars near the topic headings will watch only that topic. I have the entire page watched and new topics appear on my watchlist. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 12:52, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
I've come across this feature for the first time today. I don't like the fact that new topics now go to the top of the page. Even worse that this, I especially don't like automatic watching of a post. I posted a courtesy notice to WT:HANTS re an AfD of an article that falls under their remit. As such, there is no need for editors to reply. There is even less need for me to be notified that they have replied. The purpose of notifying the AfD was to encourage editors to a) comment, and b) improve the article to demonstrate that it should be kept - if that was how they felt. My watchlist is confined to a very few quality articles that I monitor to ensure the remain quality, and a very, very few editors that I keep an eye on, mostly vandals although I do occasionally mentor editors at a distance and watchlist their talk pages for this purpose. Mjroots ( talk) 07:54, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
Should this
Flow will eventually replace the current Wikipedia talk page system
be changed to this?
Flow may eventually replace the current Wikipedia talk page system
Flow should need to get community consensus before it is implemented and should not be forced onto the community IMO. I hope the wording in this document will reflect this. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 19:39, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
Pinging DannyH (WMF) and/or Quiddity (WMF), as the WMF staff listed as handling this page. Either a comment or action on Doc's request would be great. Thanx. Alsee ( talk) 18:51, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
Previously developers here asked Wikipedia:WikiProject Breakfast to test flow and applied template:Flow-enabled for the research period. At Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-02/News and notes it is reported that Flow is no longer being developed.
Do you still need test data from this and other WikiProjects? What is your plan for notifying people who agreed to support Flow research by using Flow? If you are no longer requesting users to use Flow for your testing, then may I request that at WP:Breakfast and other communities which consented to participate in testing that you report the end of the test and offer to revert the discussion forum to the usual format?
Thanks. I hope that the effort volunteers gave to testing this was useful to you. I raised the general issue of winding down studies at meta:Research_talk:Committee#Interaction_with_research_participants_at_the_end_of_a_study Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:02, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
Hi everyone, here's a copy of the message from Dannyh:
For a while now, the Collaboration team has been working on Flow, the structured discussion system. I want to let you know about some changes in that long-term plan.
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.
On behalf of the Collaboration team, Quiddity (WMF) ( talk) 22:23, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
This section does link to some research data regarding our talk pages. People trying to weigh the benefits/costs of a Talk-->Flow transition may find some information there. More peripherally, most Internet venues of communication look like Flow and not like Talk, which may say something about the suitability of both for discussion. One consideration of mine (I don't think I've found the answer yet): Does Flow allow to put header posts (or sticky threads) on talk pages? The main difference I see between talk pages as they are nowadays and a forum is that we use talk pages for header statements, such as e.g which WikiProject cares about a page. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk, contributions) 09:32, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
At the risk of sounding unnecessarily harsh, could some native speaker translate that message from WMFish to English? As far as I understand, the original plan was to turn Flow into a customizable tool to be used in all instances listed above, with slightly different functions active in article talk pages, user talk pages, FAC discussions and so on (different workflows, same tool). Now it seems Flow drops out from the agenda and will be left as-is, halfway through development, with some limited support for those communities which already made the step and implemented Flow somewhere for tests.
Sorry, but I'm confused and slightly disappointed. Many Wikimedians spend considerable time and effort trying to convince their communities that Flow is a step in a good direction, that this time the Foundation is working hand in hand with the communities to develop and introduce a functional and badly needed tool. Was it all in vain? And what's the point in testing Flow on our wikis when it's not actively developed and the tests will never lead to wide-scale adoption of the tool? // Halibu tt 12:42, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
CLARIFICATON I found Quiddity's explanation unclear, confusing, possibly unintentionally misleading (or it least I was initially mislead by it). So I carefully looked into what they are working on, and directly asked the Project Manager DannyH. It turns out that Flow development is still continuing full speed ahead. When Quiddy said Starting in October, Flow will not be in active development, as we shift the team's focus to these other priorities - it turns out to mean the Flow team will be focused on developing a specific subset of features for Flow. When Quiddy said 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, it turns out to mean they are working on a project which is designed to NOT WORK AT ALL on our existing pages.
More specifically they are developing "workflow" which - in theory - should be a great thing that everyone would love to get. Currently things like filing an AFD are an ugly multistep process. The community has created scripts, such as Twinkle, to automate the AFD process. Step 1 add AFD template at the top of the article. Step 2 create a specially formatted page for the deletion discussion. Step 3 list that page on the daily list of AFD discussions. The WMF has a lovely mockup for workflow, where the community will be able to click a few buttons and fill in a few boxes, and it will create an automated AFD process, just like the AFD scripts we currently use. We could then use the tool to create similar automated processes for Fine Article Nominations, and all of the other stuff we do. And the WMF would properly integrate those automatic-processes with the public interface. Instead of each person having to install a script like Twinkle, everyone would automatically get access to the new AFD option, people working on Fine Article Nominations would automatically get access to all the Fine Article Nomination process options, etc.
Obviously the WMF COULD create this system for existing pages - the community can (and has) already built scripts for many of these things ourselves. The WMF decided not build that tool. The WMF has decided to build a version that won't work, at all, on our existing pages. They're building it as a restricted subsystem of Flow-chatboards. It works if we eliminate all of our AFD pages, eliminate our Article Talk pages, eliminate our user Talk pages, eliminate our Administration pages, and convert everything to Flow chatboards. Alsee ( talk) 23:09, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
What about making the mobile platform suitable for collaborative editing? I'm not talking about gee-whiz features but improvements to basic functionality. For example, I can't even figure out how to get to an article's Talk page when viewing the article on mobile. Short Brigade Harvester Boris ( talk) 02:53, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
I decided to try Flow today, and experimented with previewing for an hour or so. Since I found a lot of issues, I decided to write up a description of my experience. As background, I don't use any complex templates or much beyond what's required for regular talk page discussion, which is what I focused on here. I'm sure I'm identifying some things that have fixes already planned or which I just didn't figure out how to do, so please let me know when that's the case. This is just what I found from playing around with the syntax and interface while thinking of the ways I use talk pages. Unfortunately, most of the entries in the list would make me avoid Flow until they were addressed, but perhaps this can be useful to whoever watches this page.
A few more specific things of varying importance.
Caveats: there are also a few general things about the interface, but I'm leaving those out for now; I didn't test any direct changes, so I wouldn't have found anything that happens during saving, moving pages, etc; and I did most of my testing at WikiProject Breakfast, which isn't a very complex page right now, so I can't say anything about how discussions would scale. Sunrise ( talk) 01:51, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
I know that Flow is rolled out on other wikis and used on some occasions. I guess they either have received a much better version, or are less critical. Major bugs noticed right at the start of the rollout here (more than a year and a half ago) are still present, and actually worse than ever. I'll not focus on how everyday users will experience it, that's a lnegthy post for another time (let me note though that performance is abysmal. But all the back-office actions related to a Wikipedia page suck massivley when you enter the wonderful world of Flow.
This means that, contrary to what is the case on all other pages, you can't
A second test, deleting the page and then recreating it, seems to haev effectively removed Flow from the page. Restoring the page does nothing for the history. The Flow contents seem to have totally gone...
So, I deleted it once again, and restored every revision except my last one. O-oh...
Error
An error has occurred.
Return to Main Page. [6e61b410] 2015-10-07 12:27:10: Fatal exception of type "Flow\Exception\FlowException"
Conclusion; this thing can't be maintained at any serious level, and should be removed from all live wikipedia environments until it is tested and workable. Feel free to restore the Wikipedia talk:Flow/Developer test page to the Flow version with all its history (though it isn't visible). But before you do, please check whether something like Topic:Soxgwu1j8bubl9w9 is visible to non-admins. If it is, then you have one further reason to not deploy this anywhere. If it isn't, then great, at least that part works. Fram ( talk) 12:31, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
@ Quiddity (WMF): Some other brilliant things. People at mediawiki and some other places can now make their user talk page a Flow page. Taking one example, [12] this user receives the Tech News through the Mediawiki message delivery. I repeat, someone gets on Mediawiki through Mediawiki Message Delivery their Tech News. One would suppose that that would give any technical problems and that they would notice i such a thing went somehow wrong, no? Still, week after week, the topic (section header on a normal talk page) looks like this: [[m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2015/41|Tech News: 2015-41]]
Then again, the currently second section on [13] has the nice title Special:TranslatorSignup & Flow
It looks as if there is still some work to do before this is ready to use...
By the way, perhaps one of the Flow developers (or if none are left, one of the people promoting the rollout of Flow in this state to other wikipedia-versions and user talk pages) can check the following: create a user talk page with some topics. Delete the page. Create the page again (not restoring, recreating from scratch, like a non-admin editor would do after an admin deleted the page), again as a Flow page. Do the old topics get reattached to the page or not? I would test it with the Developer test Page I deleted, but we aren't able yet to flow-enable pages (disabling is now possible by deleting the page and then rcereating it, apparently). If they do get reattached, you have another major reason not to roll out Flow any further anywhere. Fram ( talk) 13:02, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
Wrong ping in previous post, @ Quiddity (WMF): Fram ( talk) 13:09, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
@ Jdforrester (WMF):, why did you claim in your edit summary "Restoring; please do not test deletion on things the community has not said local users can undelete. Sorry for the delay!"? Which "community" would that be, and where has "the community" said this? Where, if not here, can we test the admin-functions on Flow pages? And when are these supposed to work? After all, this tool is live on many Wikis already, pushed as it is by the WMF, even though it is dreadfully incomplete (ever tried to check the history of a Flow page? Right...).
It looks as if you can't undelete it as well, which is not surprising but rather ironic. Please, in the future, communicate at the talk page when you want to tell us something, don't communicate through edit summaries. And inform us of what went wrong and what you plan on doing to correct this (suggestion: get rid of Flow completely). I thought the WMF would have learned at least that much after all these years and all these fiasco's. Testing is only a distant dream, but the basics of communication with "the community" should be acquired by now. Perhaps Lila has some more pruning of the organisation to do... Fram ( talk) 20:55, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
If you wonder what I mean by "history", take a look at Phab 67088, opened after a report from me in May 2014, and closed in February 2015 as closed resolved. Yeah right... Oh, and suddenly in September 2015 we have Phab 112230 with the same problem, opened by the person who solved the previous one. It's like a déjà-VE all over again. Still, with 968 open Flow bugs, I guess you'll all be kept busy for the foreseeable future. Fram ( talk) 11:14, 5 November 2015 (UTC)
![]() | This is an archive of past discussions. Do not edit the contents of this page. If you wish to start a new discussion or revive an old one, please do so on the current talk page. |
Archive 10 | ← | Archive 12 | Archive 13 | Archive 14 | Archive 15 |
While creating a deletion request at Wikimedia Commons (it works similar to the Articles for deletion process here, with individual pages created for each request), I wondered how an implementation of Flow for talk pages would affect participation in deletion discussions. The deletion process here or at Commons is outside of talk space - so it wouldn't necessarily be directly affected by Flow, I suppose. But if regular talk would change to Flow and more casual users would only be familiar with the Flow way of commenting, couldn't that lead to even less participiation by lesser experienced users in areas such as deletion requests? On the other hand, I can hardly imagine how the AfD process should be converted to use Flow. Is this something already discussed somewhere? Gestumblindi ( talk) 20:48, 26 November 2014 (UTC)
This will be another fiasco like Media Viewer if we don't get more eyes on it. It seems that hardly anyone has really looked at this and tried it out. Crazy idea #47815: Throw it on a very heavily used page now, to ensure that everyone sees it and uses it, for a month or so. More eyes, more comments = better results. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 05:44, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
Your idea is being tested on the French, at fr:Wikipédia:Forum des nouveaux/Flow. Looking at the history, it is clear that a lot of it is simply not visible. The page looks more like a vandal magnet than anything else. Looking there, I note other problems apart from thos eI listed above, like: the "what links here" page doesn't work (and the reverse, something that is linked on a Flow page, shows up as "Sujet:S6uomx6azjq9rtvw", not as "Wikipédia:Forum des nouveaux/Flow", making it impossible to find some discussion in this way when there are quite a few links); the relative timestamps don't change to absolute ones if you change the sorting of the table (from newest to most recently active). And infinite scrolling sucks badly. Trying to get to the end of the page takes ages and lots of clicks. And search doesn't work: not the internal search engine (not at all), and obviously browser-search only works on the visible part of the Flow page, not on the hidden older topics. There is a discussion on "lagomorphe" on that Flow page, but you can't find it.
All these things have been known for ages, and are serious problems. No idea why they still insist on rolling this out, but at least they are bothering other wikipedia versions for a change. Rolling the current version out here, even if it has the support of some WMF employees, some people who have received grants from the WMF, and a few seslect uninvolved editors, will with near-certainty lead to another enwiki-WMF clash, and that is one thing both can do without. Fram ( talk) 08:29, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
Ok, a bad way to get more testers (I did call my own idea crazy, you know). That said, I don't want to see a repeat of the Media Viewer fiasco. I think once the developers reach a certain point, they should maybe run an RfC simply asking "Should the Wikimedia Foundation continue to develop this software?" That way, if everyone's gonna hate it, they stop earlier in the process, not waste development time and dollars, and not piss of the editing communities. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 15:34, 28 November 2014 (UTC)
I fully support this sort of test, but I support putting it on the page for Gamergate, or Global Warming, or any major religion, or the latest article on white-cop-kills-unarmed-black-youth, or something resembling Expelled:_No_Intelligence_Allowed when it was a fresh release. I want the WMF to see the complete obliteration of article development when mobs of non-editors are on-ramped into our work areas. Alsee ( talk) 01:51, 7 December 2014 (UTC)
So, I'm doing more brainstorming here, and this is the result this time: User:Oiyarbepsy/Wikitalk and Flow:The Best of Both Worlds. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 05:38, 6 December 2014 (UTC)
I think one of the problems in discussions like the one above is that we don't always mean the same thing when we talk about Flow:
I think we could have a more constructive discussion if we tried harder to make clear what we're talking about, and if we would as far as possible separate the discussion about technical points like data models and software features from the political ones like who does the programming and who decides what software is deployed where. — HHHIPPO 23:26, 7 December 2014 (UTC)
In July, User:Quiddity (WMF) (I presume) moved Topic: The Washington & Jefferson College Review to Topic- The Washington & Jefferson College Review. However, this doesn't show up in the page history. Can this kind of thing please be avoided? Things which don't appear in the history (except real oversight issues) create mistrust and confusion.
Would it be a technical issue if the page was moved to Topic : The Washington & Jefferson College Review? This would more closely resemble the correct title.
Oh, and by the way, if you now search for the original title, you get a nice pink error: [cca66461] 2014-12-10 15:32:57: Fatal exception of type Flow\Exception\InvalidInputException. Considering that the links to the moved page were only corrected nearly two months after the page move, quite a few people mauy have encountered this... Fram ( talk) 15:36, 10 December 2014 (UTC)
Does one need to (or should one) enable the "Automatically enable all new beta features" option to begin using this? I'm hesitant to just jump in there without asking first, but I would like to be helpful in some way with regard to this project if possible, as it evolves. DonaldKronos ( talk) 07:13, 29 December 2014 (UTC)
Lila Tretikov has made an interesting statement about Flow at her talk page. ( Permalink to discussion). Diego ( talk) 14:19, 7 January 2015 (UTC)
This is a major discussion page about Flow, so I thought Flow would be enabled on this page. -- t numbermaniac c 05:13, 26 January 2015 (UTC)
VisualEditor 2: Electric Boogaloo anyone? -- DSA510 Pls No AndN 06:43, 30 January 2015 (UTC)
@ Quiddity (WMF):, you have a dead link of the WP:Flow page. It appears that it's supposed to be a link to your testwiki talk page demonstrating templates or something, but it doesn't work properly. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 04:32, 10 March 2015 (UTC)
The text edit box takes wikimarkup, but if your goal is a modern UI, it would be nice to have a toolbar for bold, italic, wikilink, hyperlink, special chars, insert media, and so on. SageGreenRider ( talk) 02:12, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
If you want an example of how complicated talk pages can become, take a look into the Total Perspective Vortex at Talk:Phineas Gage. ;-) — Preceding unsigned comment added by SageGreenRider ( talk • contribs) 02:30, 9 April 2015 (UTC)
Back on topic, once Flow is actually a completed product (it's not), as I see it, most of Alsee's complaints would be satisfied by adding a "wikiview" button to Flow pages that would generate a wikitext version usable by bots and scripts and the like. 99.9% of our talk page functions will work problem-free with Flow simply by introducing sub-sections. But there are so many probably with using a wikimodel for discussions, that something's gotta give. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 12:45, 15 April 2015 (UTC)
A new indentation & threading model has been deployed in today's update. Here's a detailed explanation about this from DannyH, including a comparison with the wikitext indentation habits and traditions (and how confusing those "rules" are for almost all newcomers, especially in large threads), and links to past-discussions, phabricator, and some related ideas.
The short-version (an excerpt) is:
In this new version: If you're replying to the most recent post, then your reply just lines up under the previous message. A two-person back and forth conversation just looks flat, and the visual separation is noted with the user name and timestamp.
If you're specifically replying to a previous post, then your reply creates an indented tangent. If everybody responding on that tangent replies to the last message in that subthread, then it'll stay at the same indentation level. But if someone replies to an older message within the subthread, then that creates a third indentation level. It's set to a maximum of 8 possible indentation levels, and we just stop it there because there's a point where you can't fit a lot of text in each line.
The big idea of the new system is that the indentation should actually mean something. You should be able to tell the difference between a simple conversation and a complicated conversation at a glance, and using indented tangents helps you to spot the places in a conversation where there's a disagreement or a deeper level of detail.
A few editors have said they like it, but it wasn't clear to them how it was meant to work, until they'd read this explanation. Please discuss it here and in the topic linked above, and let the team know what suggestions/requests/concerns/ideas you have. Thank you! Quiddity (WMF) ( talk) 23:32, 1 April 2015 (UTC)
Here I've talked a little about the relative advantages and disadvantages of the new Flow indentation vs the old talk page convention (it's not really part of mediawiki, just a style guideline). In summary, the new threading model doesn't create as many deep indentation levels, and the conversation can run much longer without requiring indentation tricks; with the new model I wouldn't have needed the above {{ outdent}} template to return the conversation to a sane left margin.
In fact, the threading model is independent of the software platform, and could be perfectly used on wikitext as well. I have posted here an example of this very conversation under the current Flow threading model, and here with the proposed refinement (they only differ in the order of the last three posts). Can you see how the model may be simpler to understand to a person reading Talk pages for the first time? Diego ( talk) 09:41, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
P.S. Moreover, suppose now DannyH wants to make a direct reply to your latest post above (21:40, 20 April 2015). What is the expected position where he should place it? In both versions of the new model there's a definite position where such reply should be placed, and the conversation can grow almost indefinitely following a consistent set of rules; but in the current wikitext model, it's not clear how one should reply directly to a nested post and keep the conversation growing after someone uses an {{ outdent}}. Diego ( talk) 11:23, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
Still, I am not sure I would have guessed what that horizontal line means that soon (perhaps in five minutes), if I was not a participant of the discussion...Same thing could be said of the outdent line, or placing two posts one below the other at the same indentation level, which have particular meanings in the current convention that are not obvious. Any system will have edge cases which need to be explained - the test for knowing if a system is intuitive is whether you need to explain the simple, most common case before it can be understood. Diego ( talk) 23:16, 21 April 2015 (UTC)
Related to the comments above and elsewhere, this page will have Flow enabled on Wednesday (PDT afternoon). It will follow the usual rollout process, with the current contents being archived to the latest subpage archive, and the current header templates being copied across. I'll also update the header templates once Flow is enabled. Quiddity (WMF) ( talk) 08:11, 28 April 2015 (UTC)
@ Quiddity (WMF): What?!?! After many extensive discussions of Flow on the Executive Director's talk page she told us Flow was on hold and agreed with our objections.
Last month I double-checked and asked her to clarify the situation:
Hi, we have paused any but requested rollouts of Flow, but we have not resolved yet how the mission might be changed -- hence the page has not changed yet. To the guest above: great to hear your interest in helping us build wikis. You can find more info here (if you have not done so already): https://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/How_to_become_a_MediaWiki_hacker LilaTretikov (WMF) (talk) 00:21, 18 March 2015 (UTC)
I am not aware of the Community establishing a Consensus to request Flow here. Alsee ( talk) 09:06, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
There are some important use cases that Flow doesn't handle yet, like... most workflows.-- That's more than some. 163.1.120.19 ( talk) 21:38, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
Using Flow on this page is a great way to ensure that people who refuse to use Flow pages (such as myself) will be excluded. I already saw some notification about a Flow survey thingie on MediaWiki and didn't participate in that either for the same reason. As per the above, we don't want this here and we have enough pages to test it on. ekips39❦ talk 23:30, 29 April 2015 (UTC)
Feedback heard, loud and clear. I mistakenly read the earlier thread as being open to the possibility of testing it here; I'll make sure to ask next time, per the standard Flow rollout process. For what it's worth, many other wikis are happily testing Flow, and requesting specific features and tweaks in order to deploy it to more pages at their wikis, e.g. The Catalan Wikipedia has Flow at all their Village Pumps now, and is discussing where else they'd like to try it next; and the French Wikipedia has been using Flow at a sub-page of their Newcomers Help Desk for a few months, and the devs are preparing the remaining features necessary to migrate Frwiki's main Newcomers Help Desk over to Flow. There are test pages at, and ongoing discussions with, the Portuguese, Hebrew, Russian, Chinese, Punjabi, and Telugu Wikipedias. Development is going steadily towards the use-cases that editors ask for, as well as further improvements of the backend and the feeds. Anyway, thanks to the folk who offered constructive feedback, and sorry again that I let my enthusiasm overwhelm my usual caution, before posting the original plan. Quiddity (WMF) ( talk) 19:43, 8 May 2015 (UTC)
When a thread on the Developer test page had its name changed, the notification was incorrect. As can be seen here, it showed the name which it was changed to twice, instead of the name which was changed from and the name which it was changed to once each. Origamite ⓣ ⓒ 15:12, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
The page header is completely covering the discussions, except a tiny sliver on the left. I can click in the text boxes, but everything else is hidden under the header, including the all-important post button. Upon loading the page, for a split second it shows the header on the right of the discussion board, but it almost instantly expands to cover everything up.
I'm using Chrome on Win8. I have the user script for adjusting the width of the discussion board area. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 14:24, 5 June 2015 (UTC)
I just tried to correct a minor misprint ("notofication") on the head of Wikipedia talk:Flow/Developer test page (twice). This didn't work. There was no warning or reservation; I got up an edit box, did the edit, and seemingly saved it; but it doesn't take. There seems to be a bug, either in some inbuilt restriction of the right to edit not being displayed, or in the saving process.
If indeed the possibilities to edit the page header is to be restricted (e. g. to Flow developers or to enwiki administrators) then there should be a warning about this, or at least not seem to be edit possibilities. Best, JoergenB ( talk) 19:55, 15 August 2015 (UTC)
Is there any way to watchlist an entire page with Flow instead of just a single topic? I tried watchlisting Wikipedia_talk:Flow/Test_page and it only adds a single topic, not the whole page. Maybe I'm doing something wrong? Short Brigade Harvester Boris ( talk) 20:16, 3 May 2015 (UTC)
For Flow pages, there are two sets of stars. The star up next to the new topic button (in the usual location) will watch the entire page. The stars near the topic headings will watch only that topic. I have the entire page watched and new topics appear on my watchlist. Oiyarbepsy ( talk) 12:52, 4 May 2015 (UTC)
I've come across this feature for the first time today. I don't like the fact that new topics now go to the top of the page. Even worse that this, I especially don't like automatic watching of a post. I posted a courtesy notice to WT:HANTS re an AfD of an article that falls under their remit. As such, there is no need for editors to reply. There is even less need for me to be notified that they have replied. The purpose of notifying the AfD was to encourage editors to a) comment, and b) improve the article to demonstrate that it should be kept - if that was how they felt. My watchlist is confined to a very few quality articles that I monitor to ensure the remain quality, and a very, very few editors that I keep an eye on, mostly vandals although I do occasionally mentor editors at a distance and watchlist their talk pages for this purpose. Mjroots ( talk) 07:54, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
Should this
Flow will eventually replace the current Wikipedia talk page system
be changed to this?
Flow may eventually replace the current Wikipedia talk page system
Flow should need to get community consensus before it is implemented and should not be forced onto the community IMO. I hope the wording in this document will reflect this. Doc James ( talk · contribs · email) 19:39, 24 August 2015 (UTC)
Pinging DannyH (WMF) and/or Quiddity (WMF), as the WMF staff listed as handling this page. Either a comment or action on Doc's request would be great. Thanx. Alsee ( talk) 18:51, 28 August 2015 (UTC)
Previously developers here asked Wikipedia:WikiProject Breakfast to test flow and applied template:Flow-enabled for the research period. At Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-02/News and notes it is reported that Flow is no longer being developed.
Do you still need test data from this and other WikiProjects? What is your plan for notifying people who agreed to support Flow research by using Flow? If you are no longer requesting users to use Flow for your testing, then may I request that at WP:Breakfast and other communities which consented to participate in testing that you report the end of the test and offer to revert the discussion forum to the usual format?
Thanks. I hope that the effort volunteers gave to testing this was useful to you. I raised the general issue of winding down studies at meta:Research_talk:Committee#Interaction_with_research_participants_at_the_end_of_a_study Blue Rasberry (talk) 15:02, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
Hi everyone, here's a copy of the message from Dannyh:
For a while now, the Collaboration team has been working on Flow, the structured discussion system. I want to let you know about some changes in that long-term plan.
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.
On behalf of the Collaboration team, Quiddity (WMF) ( talk) 22:23, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
This section does link to some research data regarding our talk pages. People trying to weigh the benefits/costs of a Talk-->Flow transition may find some information there. More peripherally, most Internet venues of communication look like Flow and not like Talk, which may say something about the suitability of both for discussion. One consideration of mine (I don't think I've found the answer yet): Does Flow allow to put header posts (or sticky threads) on talk pages? The main difference I see between talk pages as they are nowadays and a forum is that we use talk pages for header statements, such as e.g which WikiProject cares about a page. Jo-Jo Eumerus ( talk, contributions) 09:32, 3 September 2015 (UTC)
At the risk of sounding unnecessarily harsh, could some native speaker translate that message from WMFish to English? As far as I understand, the original plan was to turn Flow into a customizable tool to be used in all instances listed above, with slightly different functions active in article talk pages, user talk pages, FAC discussions and so on (different workflows, same tool). Now it seems Flow drops out from the agenda and will be left as-is, halfway through development, with some limited support for those communities which already made the step and implemented Flow somewhere for tests.
Sorry, but I'm confused and slightly disappointed. Many Wikimedians spend considerable time and effort trying to convince their communities that Flow is a step in a good direction, that this time the Foundation is working hand in hand with the communities to develop and introduce a functional and badly needed tool. Was it all in vain? And what's the point in testing Flow on our wikis when it's not actively developed and the tests will never lead to wide-scale adoption of the tool? // Halibu tt 12:42, 4 September 2015 (UTC)
CLARIFICATON I found Quiddity's explanation unclear, confusing, possibly unintentionally misleading (or it least I was initially mislead by it). So I carefully looked into what they are working on, and directly asked the Project Manager DannyH. It turns out that Flow development is still continuing full speed ahead. When Quiddy said Starting in October, Flow will not be in active development, as we shift the team's focus to these other priorities - it turns out to mean the Flow team will be focused on developing a specific subset of features for Flow. When Quiddy said 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, it turns out to mean they are working on a project which is designed to NOT WORK AT ALL on our existing pages.
More specifically they are developing "workflow" which - in theory - should be a great thing that everyone would love to get. Currently things like filing an AFD are an ugly multistep process. The community has created scripts, such as Twinkle, to automate the AFD process. Step 1 add AFD template at the top of the article. Step 2 create a specially formatted page for the deletion discussion. Step 3 list that page on the daily list of AFD discussions. The WMF has a lovely mockup for workflow, where the community will be able to click a few buttons and fill in a few boxes, and it will create an automated AFD process, just like the AFD scripts we currently use. We could then use the tool to create similar automated processes for Fine Article Nominations, and all of the other stuff we do. And the WMF would properly integrate those automatic-processes with the public interface. Instead of each person having to install a script like Twinkle, everyone would automatically get access to the new AFD option, people working on Fine Article Nominations would automatically get access to all the Fine Article Nomination process options, etc.
Obviously the WMF COULD create this system for existing pages - the community can (and has) already built scripts for many of these things ourselves. The WMF decided not build that tool. The WMF has decided to build a version that won't work, at all, on our existing pages. They're building it as a restricted subsystem of Flow-chatboards. It works if we eliminate all of our AFD pages, eliminate our Article Talk pages, eliminate our user Talk pages, eliminate our Administration pages, and convert everything to Flow chatboards. Alsee ( talk) 23:09, 6 September 2015 (UTC)
What about making the mobile platform suitable for collaborative editing? I'm not talking about gee-whiz features but improvements to basic functionality. For example, I can't even figure out how to get to an article's Talk page when viewing the article on mobile. Short Brigade Harvester Boris ( talk) 02:53, 8 September 2015 (UTC)
I decided to try Flow today, and experimented with previewing for an hour or so. Since I found a lot of issues, I decided to write up a description of my experience. As background, I don't use any complex templates or much beyond what's required for regular talk page discussion, which is what I focused on here. I'm sure I'm identifying some things that have fixes already planned or which I just didn't figure out how to do, so please let me know when that's the case. This is just what I found from playing around with the syntax and interface while thinking of the ways I use talk pages. Unfortunately, most of the entries in the list would make me avoid Flow until they were addressed, but perhaps this can be useful to whoever watches this page.
A few more specific things of varying importance.
Caveats: there are also a few general things about the interface, but I'm leaving those out for now; I didn't test any direct changes, so I wouldn't have found anything that happens during saving, moving pages, etc; and I did most of my testing at WikiProject Breakfast, which isn't a very complex page right now, so I can't say anything about how discussions would scale. Sunrise ( talk) 01:51, 18 October 2015 (UTC)
I know that Flow is rolled out on other wikis and used on some occasions. I guess they either have received a much better version, or are less critical. Major bugs noticed right at the start of the rollout here (more than a year and a half ago) are still present, and actually worse than ever. I'll not focus on how everyday users will experience it, that's a lnegthy post for another time (let me note though that performance is abysmal. But all the back-office actions related to a Wikipedia page suck massivley when you enter the wonderful world of Flow.
This means that, contrary to what is the case on all other pages, you can't
A second test, deleting the page and then recreating it, seems to haev effectively removed Flow from the page. Restoring the page does nothing for the history. The Flow contents seem to have totally gone...
So, I deleted it once again, and restored every revision except my last one. O-oh...
Error
An error has occurred.
Return to Main Page. [6e61b410] 2015-10-07 12:27:10: Fatal exception of type "Flow\Exception\FlowException"
Conclusion; this thing can't be maintained at any serious level, and should be removed from all live wikipedia environments until it is tested and workable. Feel free to restore the Wikipedia talk:Flow/Developer test page to the Flow version with all its history (though it isn't visible). But before you do, please check whether something like Topic:Soxgwu1j8bubl9w9 is visible to non-admins. If it is, then you have one further reason to not deploy this anywhere. If it isn't, then great, at least that part works. Fram ( talk) 12:31, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
@ Quiddity (WMF): Some other brilliant things. People at mediawiki and some other places can now make their user talk page a Flow page. Taking one example, [12] this user receives the Tech News through the Mediawiki message delivery. I repeat, someone gets on Mediawiki through Mediawiki Message Delivery their Tech News. One would suppose that that would give any technical problems and that they would notice i such a thing went somehow wrong, no? Still, week after week, the topic (section header on a normal talk page) looks like this: [[m:Special:MyLanguage/Tech/News/2015/41|Tech News: 2015-41]]
Then again, the currently second section on [13] has the nice title Special:TranslatorSignup & Flow
It looks as if there is still some work to do before this is ready to use...
By the way, perhaps one of the Flow developers (or if none are left, one of the people promoting the rollout of Flow in this state to other wikipedia-versions and user talk pages) can check the following: create a user talk page with some topics. Delete the page. Create the page again (not restoring, recreating from scratch, like a non-admin editor would do after an admin deleted the page), again as a Flow page. Do the old topics get reattached to the page or not? I would test it with the Developer test Page I deleted, but we aren't able yet to flow-enable pages (disabling is now possible by deleting the page and then rcereating it, apparently). If they do get reattached, you have another major reason not to roll out Flow any further anywhere. Fram ( talk) 13:02, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
Wrong ping in previous post, @ Quiddity (WMF): Fram ( talk) 13:09, 7 October 2015 (UTC)
@ Jdforrester (WMF):, why did you claim in your edit summary "Restoring; please do not test deletion on things the community has not said local users can undelete. Sorry for the delay!"? Which "community" would that be, and where has "the community" said this? Where, if not here, can we test the admin-functions on Flow pages? And when are these supposed to work? After all, this tool is live on many Wikis already, pushed as it is by the WMF, even though it is dreadfully incomplete (ever tried to check the history of a Flow page? Right...).
It looks as if you can't undelete it as well, which is not surprising but rather ironic. Please, in the future, communicate at the talk page when you want to tell us something, don't communicate through edit summaries. And inform us of what went wrong and what you plan on doing to correct this (suggestion: get rid of Flow completely). I thought the WMF would have learned at least that much after all these years and all these fiasco's. Testing is only a distant dream, but the basics of communication with "the community" should be acquired by now. Perhaps Lila has some more pruning of the organisation to do... Fram ( talk) 20:55, 4 November 2015 (UTC)
If you wonder what I mean by "history", take a look at Phab 67088, opened after a report from me in May 2014, and closed in February 2015 as closed resolved. Yeah right... Oh, and suddenly in September 2015 we have Phab 112230 with the same problem, opened by the person who solved the previous one. It's like a déjà-VE all over again. Still, with 968 open Flow bugs, I guess you'll all be kept busy for the foreseeable future. Fram ( talk) 11:14, 5 November 2015 (UTC)