Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-02/News and notes



Flow no longer in active development
The Wikimedia Foundation collaboration team announced this week, both on Wikipedia and on the WikiTech-l mailing list, that Flow will no longer be under active development.

This news will come as a bombshell for the experienced Wikimedians who have been watching the development cycle of this project. The chaotic and disorganized nature of talk page discussions on the English Wikipedia have long concerned Wikimedians and Foundation staff alike&mdash;in a Signpost editorial published just under two months ago I wrote:

Flow has been a controversial endeavor by the Foundation to thoroughly rework talk page mechanics and formatting. Its roots lay in the earlier LiquidThreads, a technical effort by WMF developers that eventually fell flat through a combination of poor technical implementation and poor community reception. At the risk of raising the eyebrows of some of our readers, the best write-up of how LiquidThreads came and went and what its relationship to Flow has been comes from Wikipediocracy: "The dream that died: Erik Möller and the WMF’s decade-long struggle for the perfect discussion system".

According to (Fuzheado), the Flow team gave an upbeat presentation on Flow's development status (video) at Wikimania just six weeks ago (though there was "hard questioning by the audience about whether the community would accept it"). Reactions are a mix of frustration that yet another effort to fix such an entrenched problem has failed and of relief that the controversial project&mdash;in the eyes of many, one of the surviving technical white elephants of the pre-Lila Tretikov era&mdash;is now apparently finito.

Flow isn't actually officially dead, according to the careful wording of the announcement. Rather, it is now out of active development pending "changes in that long-term plan". What is sidelining it now is that "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." As one user pointed out:

The rest of the announcement clarifies the situation:

In the opinions of some Wikimedians, the root problem of the Wikimedia projects isn't individual problems like talk pages or templates, but rather the technical debt of a decade and a half of disorganized organic growth; the Foundation's first round of attempts at comprehensive technical improvements fell flat not because they were poorly thought out per se, but because they failed to take into account the extraordinary complexity of the use cases to which Wikimedians have adopted wikicode. SUL finalization is now complete, but plenty of other core improvements, like interwiki transclusion (to centralize template complexity) and further development of Echo notifications (to unify notification streams), remain to complete. Such core improvements may eventually make more ambitious projects like Flow manageable.

Strategic consultation concludes as community capacity building winds up
In March, the WMF kicked off strategic planning consultation with the Wikimedia community. The first strategic plan was the Foundation's Goliath growth projection project, begun in 2009 and published in 2011 (Signpost coverage here, here, and elsewhere), yet it ultimately proved flat-footed at best. The Foundation began this process of self-definition anew this year (as part of a general shift towards an increasing focus on impact and impact metrics), starting with a large-scale community consultation. As we reported at the time, the WMF is trying to make the document into "what will become a discipline of ongoing strategic inquiry, assessment, and alignment. This more agile, adaptable process will directly inform and update our priorities and goals and help us maintain a strategic direction that is consistent with the Wikimedia vision, supports the Wikimedia projects, and is sensitive to the changing global environment."

The Foundation has finished digesting the outcomes of the consultation, and chief operating officer Terence Gilbey has published a blog post highlighting the findings. Part of this month's metrics meeting was dedicated to these findings, and a full deck of slides&mdash;119 pages of them&mdash;is is available on Commons.

The consultation was organized around two questions:

Gilbey highlights the following findings:

In related news, the Foundation is now engaging in what it calls a community capacity development project. According to an an email to the mailing list posted by the WMF's senior program officer, emerging Wikimedia communities Asaf Bartov, the Foundation is allocating staff time to "deliberate capacity-development projects with interested communities in six capacity areas: community governance; conflict management; on-wiki technical skills; new contributor engagement and growth; partnerships; [and] communications". "Community capacity" is defined as "the ability of a community to achieve ... very diverse [goals that] span issues that affect one or all Wikimedia communities." It is, in effect, a trial of a more hands-on approach on the part of the Wikimedia Foundation in recruiting ideas from the community, following along the lines of earlier breakout efforts, most prominently this year's "Inspire" campaign.



Brief notes

 * Philippe Beaudette leaving the Foundation: Long-time Wikimedian and director of community advocacy Philippe Beaudette is leaving the Foundation. Beaudette was brought on in 2009 as a facilitator for the Strategic Planning project that was ongoing at the time&mdash;by his own count, he was employee number 16&mdash;making him one of the most senior of the officers still with the WMF. In the intervening six years, Beaudette served variously as facilitator of strategic planning, head of fundraising (as part of the 2010 Annual Giving campaign), and head of Legal And Community Advocacy. Beaudette has been an administrator on the English Wikipedia since 2007.
 * IEG round: The Individual Engagement Grants grantmaking program is holding a submission round from August 31 to September 29. The IEG program is the funding platform of choice for small individual or team-based research, development, and engagement projects. Two of the program's grant officers will he holding Google Hangouts—the first on September 8, to answer proposal questions and to help polish grants that could benefit from feedback and development at the IdeaLab.
 * Metrics: The next WMF Metrics and activities meeting will be on Thursday, September 3.
 * Develop the Digital Library Card Platform: The Wikimedia Library program has been growing at a fast clip and now finds itself in need of a stronger core platform. Last week saw the announcement of the opening of a position for a developer experienced with web applications and open-development frameworks who can build a Wikimedia Library "Digital Library Card Platform tool". A lengthier description as well as a point of contact for interested parties is available here.
 * Mobile legalese: The WMF has published a set of guidelines for mobile developers using the Wikimedia trademark, presented in condensed form in a recent blog post.
 * August in Edu: The August edition of the Education Newsletter has now been published.
 * RfC on the 2015 ArbCom election: A request for comment on the upcoming Arbitration Committee election has been opened. The RfC was created to "provide an opportunity to amend the structure, rules, and procedures of the December 2015 English Wikipedia Arbitration Committee election and resolve any issues not covered by existing rules."
 * WLM banner saga continues: A referral for comment has been spun up on the meta-wiki regarding the time conflict between Foundation fundraising and the Wiki Loves Monuments movement. Given the lopsided nature of the vote, as well as the loaded questions being asked by the RfC organizers, your author considers it yet more evidence of the inflammatory feedback loop between Foundation non-communication and community worked-up-ness. For more coverage see this week's Discussion report.
 * New administrators: Wbm1058 is this week's newest administrator.
 * 100K: The Belarusian Wikipedia reached 100,000 articles this week. Keeping in the tradition of things the encyclopedia uploaded a unique 100,000-themed take on the Wikipedia logo.