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Flow

Where did the discussion to enable Flow here go? And why is it not here? --MF-W 02:18, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

Noooooo... ♪♪♪Let it Go!, Let it Go!, ♪♪♪We don't want Flow here anymore, ♪♪♪Let it Go, Let it Go!♪♪♪,Turn it away and slam the door!♪♪♪Let it Go, Let it Go!♪♪♪ Flow sucks badly anyway!.♪♪♪ ...--Stemoc 02:26, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

You mean this one? The discussion is taking place on Wikimedia Forum for some reason. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:05, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

Where is Flow enabled, appart from Talk:Flow/Developer test page? —MarcoAurelio 13:16, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

I'm assuming you're asking about where Flow is enabled on Meta-Wiki specifically. I attempted to answer programmatically: Special:Permalink/16104905. The first query shows pages that are marked as Flow boards. The second query shows all pages that are not marked as CSS, JavaScript, or wikitext.

If you want to know where the Flow extension is deployed to Wikimedia wikis, you will need to consult <https://noc.wikimedia.org/conf/>. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:42, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

Thanks, that was what I was looking for. Maybe we should move it here. --MF-W 20:17, 27 November 2016 (UTC)

Enabling flow on one page (Research:ORES paper)

Moved from Wikimedia Forum

Hey folks, I'm working on writing a new research manuscript at Research:ORES paper (will be renamed to something more interesting at some point). I'd like to enable mw:Flow for the discussion page. I plan to experiment with using Flow as a public forum to discuss the manuscript (a mixture of Wikipedians and non-Wikipedians).

I wanted to raise the proposal here because there was an RFC that happened in the past with no-consensus. See Meta:Requests for comment/Enable flow in the Research talk (203) namespace. I closed this old RFC the future of Flow support from WMF engineering was not clear and that raised some serious concerns. However the Flow documentation now says:

The [Collaboration Team] will continue to fix bugs, and make sure that people who are using Flow continue to have a good experience.

Rather than re-open the RFC at this point, I'd like to experiment by enabling Flow on a single page in the Research namespace (the aforementioned Research:ORES paper). Any concerns? --EpochFail (talk) 01:28, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

Hi EpochFail. My sense is that people active on this wiki (Meta-Wiki regulars) have little interest in Meta-Wiki being a test bed for experimental software. Nothing in your post here convinces me that attitudes have shifted. I'm not sure I even knew that Meta:Requests for comment/Enable flow in the Research talk (203) namespace took place, but knowing about it now, it personally makes me even more hesitant. I sympathize with wanting better discussion tools and I sympathize with wanting to be able to do your own thing on your own pages, but if you're looking for consensus from the Meta-Wiki community to expand the use of Flow, it seems unlikely you'll find it.

I'm pretty sure I've made similar comments elsewhere, but I think a lot of people felt "burned" by LiquidThreads, the spiritual predecessor to Flow (even though some people involved in Flow's development vehemently denied that). The migration path away from LiquidThreads or Flow is very difficult, so escaping a bad decision becomes a lot more complicated in the event that Flow, like LiquidThreads or the solutions before it, get abandoned.

I thought Flow had been put into "maintenance mode" and was slowly dying off. The "ee" mailing list's activity can perhaps attest to this, though mw:Flow/Rollout says Flow has spread to about a dozen additional Wikimedia wikis in 2016. I consider myself somewhat technical and I don't know what Flow as a "beta feature" means. It gives the impression that a user can enable or disable Flow in his or her user preferences (i.e., Special:Preferences), but that... can't be right, I don't think. Flow pages (boards, whatever) can't simply be disabled by a user, as far as I know. If they could, I imagine you'd see a lot faster adoption of Flow! --MZMcBride (talk) 03:14, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

Addendum: I finally found mailarchive:wikimedia-l/2016-September/085114.html, which provides some background and context. --MZMcBride (talk) 03:20, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

It is possible to enable Flow on several wikis as a Beta feature, by selecting an option in user preferences. At the moment, this Beta system is out of order and we are fixing it. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 09:03, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

•  Oppose In addition to what said above: it is not appropriate to expose people to inconsistent discussion systems; Meta-Wiki contains a lot of our wiki history, which ought to be preserved in a future-proof format like wikitext; I see no indication whatsoever that this system will improve in the future and I see practically no fixes of user-reported bugs or feature requests, except some dangerous, harmful and annoying regressions which should have been resolved on day 0 by starting the project with a proper design (rather than the totally flawed design made in 2012 and early 2013). Nemo 07:05, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

Just to be clear, you're opposing me doing what I think needs to be done in order to get my collaborators working on-wiki and out in public. Currently, scholarly practices like discussing a manuscript in progress happens in private. I think that's a great loss and a missed opportunity for Wikimedia. I'm trying to re-engineer scientific practice to be more open. My collaborators won't be using talk pages because they just don't make sense to anyone who's worked anywhere other than Wikipedia on the internet. I think it's worthwhile to bring scholarly practice to the wiki and you're saying "no". Why?

Nemo's list of phab task seems very cherry picked. I could do that about any production system. E.g. ORES is dangerous and annoying. You'll see that we're primarily focusing on operational concerns -- not user-reported bugs and requests. Yet we'd like to deploy prediction models for Meta anyway. So, apparently, we are interested in experimental software running on Meta. (Also, I should note that the list that Nemo links to has many user-reported bug fixes.)

I think I'm pretty representative of the community of people who document their research on meta. I'm at least the most prolific contributor to that space. MZMcBride notes that I'm unlikely to find consensus on Meta about using Flow *at all*. That might be true, but of people who actually edit in the Research namespace on Meta, we have a clear consensus that we want to have Flow. This is a serious point of departure between our subcommunity and the rest of the Meta. By saying no to running Flow on one page as an experiment, you're preventing us from trying it at all. Nemo complains that by enabling Flow on one page, we'll have "inconsistent discussion systems", but what alternative do we have for showing you (Meta-Flow-naysayers) how much of a difference it will make to us (Meta-Researchers)? --EpochFail (talk) 16:06, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

Yes, I manually picked the latest resolved tasks that I could find which were closest to being user-reported. I remind you that it's you saying that Flow is maintained and everything, against the latest official statement, so the onus of proof is on you, not the others. I don't know what the ORES comparison is for, so I'll skip that.

The RfC did not show such a consensus in the "subcommunity", as far as I can remember. As for ways to show the difference Flow will make, I guess one option is to study the impact of the usage of Flow on other wikis.

However, even before we start collecting evidence on what will be good for the wiki and the Research namespace, there might be a need to discuss and clarify the general goals and principles: it's certainly possible that there are conflicting goals here, e.g. «re-engineer scientific practice to be more open» may not be everyone's first goal. Nemo 17:14, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

I brought ORES into the discussion to challenge the assertion that Flow development is in an undesirable state for use in Meta.

When I asked JMatazzoni about the status of Flow development and support, he directed me to the quote I pulled from the Flow documentation above. "The [Collaboration Team] will continue to fix bugs, and make sure that people who are using Flow continue to have a good experience." I feel like that is a pretty clear statement, Nemo. What else do you want?

Regarding the past RFC, all participants who had actually edited in the Research namespaces (with the exception of you, Nemo) supported switching to Flow. All provided substance for their arguments while you provided almost no explanation -- claiming that you'd be "forced to stop" commenting on research pages if Flow was deployed. This is obviously not true and only betrays a strong ideological bias you have against the software -- usability aside. I think that shows a pretty clear consensus, honestly.

I understand that your first goal might not be to bring Science to Wikimedian practices of open discussion and open access, but it is something that those of us Wiki Research scholars active on Meta *are* trying to do. Do you feel like this is in conflict with Wikimedia's goals? I don't think so. I think it's clearly well-aligned and I don't understand how you could disagree. --EpochFail (talk) 18:19, 23 November 2016 (UTC)

• Support This change would help people who want to participate in on-wiki discussions around a particular research project, and whose input would be valuable to that research project, but who are not comfortable using wikimarkup on talkpages, contribute to that project. As EpochFail says, it's about getting external collaborators working on-wiki and out in public. There also is nothing inherently wrong with exposing people to inconsistent discussion systems. I'm not aware of any principle of design that asserts that consistency trumps usability: the mechanism used for discussion should be designed to meet the needs of the target audience. Furthermore, we develop specialized workflows and workarounds across all our projects to address particular needs. We used a gadget on the Teahouse Q&A board to make it easier for newbies to participate, and there have been no negative consequences of that decision that I've seen (MZMcBride and I argued back and forth about this point extensively in the early days). Nemo_bis is your objection to Flow specifically, or would you also be opposed to enabling the Teahouse Q&A gadget (or another gadget-based solution) on this single page as well? Jtmorgan (talk) 19:48, 23 November 2016 (UTC)
  • Hi Jtmorgan. Yes, you were able to create your own special snowflake on the English Wikipedia called the Teahouse. Building infrastructure and tools that fit many use-cases is hard. Hacking together your own custom/one-off thing is easy. If you're interested in helping out with the hard work instead of marginally increasing our collective technical debt, both phabricator:T7642 and phabricator:T33919 remain unresolved. :-) --MZMcBride (talk) 18:53, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
• I have no issue with this. – Ajraddatz (talk) 02:43, 26 November 2016 (UTC)
• Support I have been using the Flow system for half a year on my home wiki and it works quite well. That does not imply that there are no problems with the system, but hey there are bugs all over Mediawiki, so it is no different than the rest of the code. — Jeblad 17:32, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
• Personally, I think Flow is still pretty bad software and I don't really wish to see it spread further at this time. That said, as someone who doesn't use Special:RecentChanges here and who likely won't be impacted by the use of Flow on this wiki, it's difficult for me to oppose. --MZMcBride (talk) 18:56, 27 November 2016 (UTC)
• Oppose I don't think Flow should be enabled on any pages here, no matter what the excuse. --MF-W 01:05, 28 November 2016 (UTC)

┌─────────────────────────────────┘
Quick summary: In support, we have Jtmorgan and EpochFail (me, the proposer) because we think it will make it easier for our collaborators to work with us. Jeblad supports saying that he has had positive experienced with Flow on another wiki. I also use Flow on another wiki and I would much rather use it than talk pages (FWIW, I have not drank the koolaide; I do not use VE because I'd rather write wikitext). Ajraddatz sees no issue with this proposal moving forward -- which I think implies light support.

MZMcBride is against this because he thinks Flow is "bad software" but admits he won't be personally inconvenienced. Nemo is against enabling flow on just one page because it might be inconsistent and has concerns over maintenance of Flow (despite clear statements documented above). MF-W opposes with no explanation.

To me, this reads pretty clearly. We have reasoned support from those who stand to benefit. I don't see a clear challenge to the "this will bring more contributors to Meta" argument. We have a report of positive experience from an actual Flow users. From the opposition, I see general statements about not liking Flow ("bad software") from non-users and concerns about it's maintenance state (that have been addressed).

So, this is a bit messy, but I see reasoned arguments (which stand unrefuted) in support and vague statements about software quality and maintenance (that have been refuted) in opposition. Given that Jtmorgan and I are the only ones who will be inconvenienced if things go badly and we'd only be enabling Flow on one page, I think this is consensus enough to move forward with the proposal. --EpochFail (talk) 21:42, 29 November 2016 (UTC)

How utterly convenient that you think your own arguments are unrefuted and opposers' refuted. Maybe an admin should rather determine the result (and I still think this section should be moved to Meta:Babel). --MF-W 15:02, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Make a list of valid arguments for and against, and disregard who said what. It isn't that many valid arguments, most of what is written is simply opinions. A lot of people misunderstands our goal, thinking the goal is the use of specific tools, and thereby refuse to use anything but pure wikitext. — Jeblad 20:29, 3 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi EpochFail. I think saying Flow is pretty bad software is fairly relevant to a discussion about extending its usage here. Did you want to get into specifics about Flow's problems? If so, we could start with its gibberish topic page titles such as Topic:Rph3qplet97huylg. Or we could discuss how much vertical screen space a single-sentence reply takes up. Or we could examine the crazy low reply depth limit.

It's a bit strange to cast Flow critics as non-users. It's not as though most people here are blindly discussing an abstract concept. We're not discussing a future software product that's currently in the idea phase. It's because people have experienced Flow that they don't like it, in my estimation. --MZMcBride (talk) 08:05, 4 December 2016 (UTC)

I'm reacting "bad software" critiques, that have answers documented in Flow's FAQ. I'm not saying that everyone have to agree with choices that have been made, but I want people to know on which well-founded reasons these choices have been made.

Gibberish topic page titles are like that because of topics centralization. Flow has been designed to allow cross-pages and cross-wiki display. Imagine that you have that conversation on a personal "inbox", and also on Meta:Babel, here and on MediaWiki Flow board. That's possible with development that have to be done, but it needs an unique ID. It is not possible to have multiple topics titled Topic:Hello. However, it is possible to change topic names, to have something more explicit, like Topic:Hello-RdZ3SJY7W5Wtr, but still with that unique ID somewhere.

Vertical space is here to improve readability, compact discussions are not easy to read. That vertical spacing can be changed in your personal CSS.

Concerning replies, Flow has a different system than the not accessible one, based on definition lists, used on old-style talk pages: you don't indent to reply, you indent when you digress. It improves readability too. That's why discussions are like that everywhere else on the Web. Trizek (WMF) (talk) 09:40, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Except you don't really "indent when you digress", you indent when you make a reply that's not the first reply to a post, even if that first reply was actually the digression, and you get the chronological ordering of the discussion out of whack when doing so. Or else you just shove your reply at the end and hope that context is enough to make it clear to everyone what you're actually replying to, and force everyone reading to follow the mixed-together threads of conversation without any UI guidance helping them to do so.

BTW, which "everywhere on the web" are you talking about? The only places that come to my mind seem to be encouraging one-off throwaway comments rather than in-depth discussion (or are email where messages are expected to include enough quoted context for each message to be entirely standalone).

P.S. To make it clear, I'm replying here in my personal capacity. Anomie (talk) 14:31, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi Trizek (WMF). Your reply reads like that of a paid advocate for Flow, which is perhaps unsurprising given that that's pretty much your professional role. Sure, these questionable design decisions are documented, but that doesn't make them correct. These same criticisms have been brought up many times (a quick skim of mw:Talk:Flow confirms). My guess is that Flow will fail due to the stubbornness of the development team in these areas. Telling users, for example, to edit their personal CSS to fix the vertical spacing is not an acceptable workflow or workaround. I don't need to be convinced that the current discussion system is inadequate, but the proposed replacement is somehow worse. --MZMcBride (talk) 14:38, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Anomie, my exemple of indentation was about Flow: it doesn't use indentation. The indentation system of wikitext talk pages is not intuitive: when do you indent? To each reply in theory, and you can indent more between two replies to digress. And you can go back to the first mine when the conversation has too much indentations. That's not intuitive -- for beginners, but not only. It also can be painful for an experienced user to understand how to indent; wikis have different ways to do that (colons and/or bullet-points, visual assistance while reading or not...). I think Flow is overall easier to use, and the survey I'm working on has results that confirm that (publication in December if everything goes well).

Replies to your question about "everywhere else on the Web" are in the FAQ.

MZMcBride, if you read me as a paid advocate, I'll also give you some background: I've been hired to be a community liaison because I was highly supporting Flow as a volunteer. I support Flow or at least a new structured discussion system because I believe in it. But I'm also very aware of that extension's weaknesses and I do my best to have improvements done. The survey will give us some information that may change things: I don't know if the result will lead to an abandon of Flow and the creation of a new project, or anything else. But I wish we will improve discussions.

We (the team) are aware of criticism made by some users. We also see silent users that use Flow daily and don't complain (despite my questions and requests for feedback). Documented decisions are criticized, they may not be correct, right; the problem is that I see most of time critiques based on "that's changing my workflow". I don't think that's always a valid argument. Re:Customize the interface: that's really common for advanced users, they also use gadgets. Remember that Flow is a work in progress. That's not a finished project and constructive feedback is still welcome to improve it (if there is a decision to improve it).

Trizek (WMF) (talk) 17:12, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

Trizek (WMF): You don't seem to have actually responded to my point, instead you seem to have constructed a strawman of some sort and replied to that instead.

Your FAQ link doesn't seem to mention at all what you are referring to when you say "everywhere else on the Web". The specific question you link merely quotes one guy who says branching conversations are bad (in his personal opinion, as far as I can tell, no examples given), and links to another guy in a footnote who uses StackOverflow and Twitter as his examples of "good" discussion systems. Anomie (talk) 17:27, 5 December 2016 (UTC)

I've been away for a while. It seems that there are a few points to respond to. MF-W, you have raised no argument at all, so your challenge to my assessments to the arguments made falls kind of flat, don't you think? Maybe you could make your own arguments and assessments rather than jumping directly towards attacking my qualities. It seems that Anomie has some concerns about the software in general. I think it's clear that these concerns don't outweigh the benefits to the users we would like to target in this deployment of Flow (ON ONE PAGE!!!), so I'd kindly like to ask him to take his general complaints to a more general forum. MZMcBride says that "saying Flow is pretty bad software is fairly relevant", but only provides his concerns about centralized topic IDs (which many see as a valuable feature) as an example that makes the software "bad". In the past, no arguments about what actually makes the software bad were made at all, so I appreciate his one example. However, I feel like that one example does not detract from the usefulness to newcomers (specifically academic researchers whom I collaborate with) in the Research namespace (in which none of the opposers are active -- even Nemo these days). To state it simply, those of us who are active there (and would be affected) really want to see this happen and I would appreciate if that is taken into consideration. Can someone who opposes this at least acknowledge that they won't be affected by this -- and that everyone who will' be affected by this is in support?--EpochFail (talk) 16:16, 8 December 2016 (UTC)

Hi EpochFail. Does this request have an associated Phabricator Maniphest task? --MZMcBride (talk) 03:09, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

I made [1]. HTH, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:09, 16 December 2016 (UTC)

•  Oppose. The proper RfC to enable it in the whole namespace was declined, so now you are trying to advance Flow on page by page basis by discussions on random pages? I am pretty sure that people interested in such a high-tech thing as ORES are capable of learning how to press the edit button and indent text with proper number of colons. That might be true that I as some other opponents are not active in Research namespace, but advance of the beta extension which has a lot of known shortcomings as opposed to plain wikitext is something of the whole wiki scope and should be managed on that level. --Base (talk) 00:11, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
• Enabling it on a single page as a test case seems reasonable to me. If we're able to attract more people to contribute and discuss their work on wikis in public, I think that's overall a win. Legoktm (talk) 05:47, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
• I as well am very sceptical with regards to enabling this anywhere on meta. I fear this may justify deployment of this tool to even more pages. I am already very frustrated with the possibility to enable flow for ones own talk page on some wikis, it makes it very hard to communicate with users among other issues (long page loading time, counterintuitive administration of flow boards, …). I understand that I will probably never come across this individual page, but I don't see why enabling this feature after a failed RFC is so badly needed. --Vogone (talk) 08:02, 18 December 2016 (UTC)
• So someone made a RfC about this and withdrawed it by saying he would ask again in a RfC, when you can determine its long term status. Until now we had no second RfC about this topic, but since today it’s alive. We had nor a consensus to enable it nor to keep it disabled because the RfC was withdrawed, but the arguments against are numerous and after all we should keep the status quo. All in all it seems a bit like you want to enable it step by step first on this page then on another because the community didn’t let you enable it on the whole namespace. – KPFC 💬 21:08, 20 December 2016 (UTC)

New Project? Wikhypothesis

Wikhypothesis would function as a repository of hypotheses about what is and all relevant evidence for said hypotheses. Thus, it could serve as the backbone for a metaanalysis of any hypothesis humans care to consider by becoming an extremely concise metajournal of all human knowledge acquisition.

Do you think this is a good new project or belongs in Wikiversity or other? Enter the conversation here: Wikhypothesis. Thanks.

[I am following Instruction #4 on Proposals for new projects: "Advertise your project!"] —The preceding unsigned comment was added by Jtdjtdjtdjtd (talk)

@Jtdjtdjtdjtd: You are definitely free to advertise and solicit opinion--I hope any feedback is valuable. It looks like you created the proposal three years ago with your alternate account User:Jtdjtdjtd.business but haven't edited since until now. That is totally your right to do but I marked the proposal as rejected since there was no discussion or a live demo or any community built around the idea in years. —Justin (koavf)❤T☮C☺M☯ 04:35, 30 November 2016 (UTC)