User:BethNaught/Draft Flow RfC

Background
Flow is a software project which has been under development by the Wikimedia Foundation since the latter half of 2013. Its stated aim is "to build a modern discussion and collaboration system for all Wikimedia projects". It follows a previous such project, LiquidThreads, which was ultimately abandoned due to severe problems. Flow replaces talk pages implemented in wiki markup, in the same software model as content pages, with a more forum-like system with discrete posts, a default input box which eschews wikitext (although a wikitext mode can be enabled) and notification system integration.

Flow was initially conceived to be, in the long run, a mandatory replacement for wikitext talk pages across Wikimedia wikis. It caused significant controversy on the English Wikipedia, particularly in mid-2014, when concerns were amplified in the context of the MediaViewer/Superprotect conflict. Concerns centered on loss of functionality, introduction of software regressions, and changes to Wikipedia ethos. Those in support of Flow said that Wikipedia should have a more technically-intuitive talk system and suggested that overall the changes would be an improvement to the software.

In September 2015, active development on Flow paused. It was put in maintenance mode (no work on major new features) while the relevant software team moved their focus to cross-wiki notifications and other Echo improvements, aimed to complete by April 2016. After that, they plan to move on to a "Workflows" project. Workflows is intended to semi-automate community workflows such as handling Articles for Deletion. The exact design of Workflows has yet to be determined, but the WMF has indicated an intent that it will only work on discussion pages that have been converted to Flow. However Flow is currently a discussion-only feature.

Flow has seen some adoption on smaller wikis. However, it is moribund on the English Wikipedia, only ever enabled on a very small number of pages. Activity on every Flow page declined to essentially zero. The majority of Flow pages have received consensus to delete. Consensus was reached to end the Flow trial at WikiProject Breakfast and return it to a talk page. That RFC was run inside Flow, with participants on both sides noting the difficulty of following the discussion to determine the outcome. The only remaining Flow pages are WikiProject Hampshire and the Flow testing page. Flow is highly unlikely to be adopted in full any time soon, due to missing features, significant opposition to some existing aspects, the fact that the WMF has relented on its plan to mandate Flow's use, as well as a backlog of approximately one thousand open bugs or other tasks. There has not yet been a major RfC where the community has had the opportunity to come to a clear conclusion.

Proposal
Flow is to be uninstalled from English Wikipedia, with existing Flow pages being converted back to wikitext. Flow is not to be reinstalled without consensus in favour at a future RfC.

Support

 * 1) As proposer. See my comments below. BethNaught (talk) 22:43, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
 * 2) Strongly Support. Flow is good for all users. I hope English Wikipedia can enable this beta function. Shwangtianyuan  Happy Chinese New Year to everyone  07:30, 7 February 2016 (UTC)

Comments

 * My reasons for this proposal fall into two categories. One, technical issues, and two, wiki principles.
 * Flow was released far too early and has several critical bugs and feature gaps. Old entries in a board's history are not accessible. Deletion and restoration are substandard. Wikipedia talk:Flow/Developer test page was de-Flowed in a hacky manner and is now borked, but Topic:Sp8k7m07gvsarmq8 still claims to be on it. Pagination is broken. Moreover the architecture prevents us from doing many standard wiki things. This is only a selection of bugs and deficits.
 * Flow maintains a separate page for each post and thread. History becomes highly fragmented, so it is impossible to catch up on a conversation by diffing it, and moreover you cannot see the state of a page at a given point in time. This is important for historical records - it is important that we can look back at past discussions and examine them. Moreover posts can only be hidden, not removed. Edits cannot be reverted, so for example vandalism, socking or trolling cannot be cleanly removed. Flow reduces flexibility about indentation. There are many other deliberate design choices which remove wiki methods and act more like a forum.
 * Wiki pages have great power. They are meant for collaboration. Talk pages are for discussion, collaboration, drafting and creation. Keeping around a moribund experiment is not only untidy but brings with it problems and causes a disservice to users who may have to learn two discussion systems. Wikitext has served us well and despite some small challenges we have a powerful and functional system which has facilitated the creation of a 5 million-article encyclopaedia. Any future software change should only be adopted when it has proved to be a greater-than-or-equal-to quality system and when it has consensus community backing. For now, it's time to come to a clear position on Flow as a community. BethNaught (talk) 22:43, 30 November 2015 (UTC)
 * Worth noting this proposal on Metawiki on this page, since even if it doesn't result in Flow being implemented anyway (there are some technical considerations in favour of such), it has received strong support and may result in enwiki losing the control on how usertalkpages are formatted.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 09:44, 24 January 2016 (UTC)