Wikidata talk:Structured Discussions

This is a page for discussion and feedback about Structured Discussions as used on Wikidata.

For a sandbox, use Wikidata talk:Flow tests.

I noticed today that a user had "hidden" two responses on my user talk page. (The hiding user was not the user whose response was hidden.) I would have expected to receive an alert or notice for this action, but I did not. Is this expected behaviour?

Submitting messages with Ctrl+Enter is now implemented.

It would be convenient if Ctrl+Return would send the message immediately.

Tracked at phab:T63517.

@Galaktos, it will be deployed next week.

Thank you! (This reply sent with Ctrl+Enter :P )

As if discussions on talk pages are not structured, the WMF in it’s infinite wisdom just decided to rename Flow to mw:Structured Discussions, the official ratio is this:

Structured Discussion was formerly known as “Flow”. Flow was a bigger project that has been re-scoped to focus on user-to-user discussions. The software has been renamed to reflect this change.

They fail to see the difference between a structure and bondage gear. And they obviously hate flexibility. As this is as well just one of this dumbed down forum impersonations, and not a proper, structured talk page, you see what I mean ;) Sänger (talk) 16:28, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

And ?

It's just an information, I don't know whether you want to move this page, wait if this misnomer of a name will stick or whatever. I won't do anything about it,. as I consider this weak forum impersonation as a dead project. Sänger (talk) 16:38, 15 September 2017 (UTC)

It’s not « just » an information, it’s an information together with a lot of sarcasm and personal opinion. Seems like the conclusion of a crusade to make something not happen. Quite antipathetic if we’re to express our personal opinions.

I agree with TomT0m – the heads-up about the name change is appreciated (the subject page needs to be updated and should also probably be renamed), but the vitriol about it is completely uncalled for. At least save that for a reply or separate post.

I’ve renamed and partially updated the page, but apparently you need special permissions to move a Flow talk page. Can someone else perhaps try to rename Wikidata Talk:Flow to Wikidata Talk:Structured Discussions?

@Trizek (WMF): Can you?

Moved.

Thanks @Stryn.

At the moment it is not possible to activate and deactivate Flow on a user talk page. Activate or deactivate Flow will lead to an empty page, with an error message.

Developers are fixing it. I'll post news when some updates will be available.

Please share that information with other users.

Update : activation of Flow as a Beta feature will be available again on Monday December 5 at 19:00 UTC.

Is this possible to do, or is the conversion a one-way conversion?

AFAIK, it is possible. The old wikitext page that is now an archive would become again the main talk page, and the Flow page would become the archive.

Thanks. I was thinking along the same lines. I'm going to try this and see if I can make it work.

To be precise, your current talk page will not be imported to Flow, or the Flow page will not be imported to the wikitext page you are using back.

If you have any trouble, please ping me! :)

Problem reported on T134158. 

I have actually a discussion with @VIGNERON (see Topic:Sphnk0g2x4zswkow) and the templates {{Q}} and {{Property}} actually label the text in english instead of french, who is the language of my preference.

Can someone solves this problem? We want to switch the project chat in french to Flow, but with this problem, we can't...

@Quiddity (WMF), Trizek (WMF): could you look into this?

Hello

Problem reported.

If you plan to deploy Flow on the Francophone village pump on Wikidata, please fill a task and mark that template issue as a blocker.

Ihttps://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Srl17hsdr3wfyes8&topic_postId=srl6rkou65ws21og&topic_revId=srl6rkou65ws21og&action=single-view

Anybody still active here ? The diff below showed my answer has been posted, but is impossible to show on my talkpage (thread : Topic:Srl17hsdr3wfyes8 ) what's the problem ? Am I blind or did I click on the wrong button ? @DannyH (WMF) @Quiddity (WMF) ?

Yup, there was a bug due to someone outside the team accidentally backporting a patch that should not have been backported (they were trying to be helpful! which will not go unpunished! ;-)

It's fixed on this wiki as of a few minutes ago, and they're working on the other wiki-groups. Sorry, and thanks.

Hi everyone,

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

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

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

---

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.

That's disappointing :( Btw is it possible to convert Flow back to wikitext mode?

This is extremely disappointing and a slap in the face of everyone who invested time in getting this enabled. The code is just going to rot, we should probably just get it over with and kick it off Wikidata.

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

Hope that helps

Yeah, we really are maintaining Flow, and the work that we do on Workflows is going to connect back up with Flow and Echo. I know this message is surprising and upsetting. As we've talked about these priorities, the #1 most important thing for me is to make sure that we aren't abandoning the people who have been enthusiastic and helpful and awesome to work with.

Okay, I have more things to say. I hope this will help, but let me know.

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

About Workflows: This is a project that we talked about at Wikimania this summer. (Here’s an updated version of the slides that we used, Workflows - Collaboration team 2015 (revised).) Workflows are multi-step wiki discussions that end in a decision -- processes like Articles for deletion, Featured article nominations, or Administrators’ noticeboard requests. They all involve structured discussions, but each process is different, and every wiki has their own version. At Wikimania, we talked about this as the project that we were planning to work on starting early 2016.

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

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

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

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

What will happen to Flow and existing Flow discussions when Workflows is done? The way you described Workflows makes it sound to me like a Flow discussion could be considered one (simple) kind of Workflow, so perhaps Flow discussions will be ported?

Yeah, Flow and Workflows will work together. Workflows is going to use Flow discussions as a service, in the same way that Flow uses VisualEditor. The editing box in Flow is using some the toolbar from VE, but it also adds some elements that VE doesn't have, like the Mentions adder and a switch from VE to wikitext.

So Workflows is going to add more to structured discussions, and the pieces that are useful for the discussion system will be ported back to Flow. Some of the discussion features that we'd planned for next quarter, like search and filters, will probably be built as part of Workflows, and then applied to Flow.

It seems that, when a talk page I've watch-listed is converted to use flow, I get a notification for each new thread. I find this distracting, as I give a lower priority of attention to my watchlist than my notifications; and the notification interface is far less user-friendly than a watchlist.

Can I stop this from happening? ~~~~

And, oh, you don't have to sign anymore with Flow

And unlike my sig, flow doesn't show my real name.

For example, if I reply here after posting

It does, but only when the chronological order of posts is broken.

I think there's a feature request for being able to modify one's signature on pages with Flow.

Nor does it indent replies...

It does, but only when the chronological order of posts is broken.

Which avoids mostly the need for Indentation Reboot, I guess.

There is a way to stop all notifications from flow in your user preferences. Maybe we should request a feature to more details choices :)

See also the topic Echo.

What topic Echo? The page I'm viewing ([https://www.wikidata.org/w/index.php?title=Topic:Smsue4ufp1ob5fet&topic_showPostId=smsv7ozgisjp6l8f&fromnotif=1#flow-post-smsv7ozgisjp6l8f]) has only one conversation.

You're directly viewing the topic and not the talkpage the topic is part of. That's why you don't see it. The topic echo I was refering to is here: Topic:Smsc2lgczpu3pgdg

You can click

< Wikidata talk:Flow

on the top of the page to go back to the main discussion page. This page is a topic page.

Oh, FFS..!

I followed the link in the notification I received...

In flow every topic is treated as if it's a page

I have '''not''' watchlisted this page, but am still getting notifications for it.

You created this item, so that's why you get notifications. Is the star next to the subject filled in or not for you? (Filled in = You're watching the thread)

The feature-request, and some ideas for resolving this issue, are at phab:T100528 ("Improve organization and control for Flow notifications (tracking + ideas)").

How do we archive old discussions? by closing topics, or we don't How do we create a sub-section? by using wikitext mode (icon </> to switch VE mode/ wikitext mode)

How do we archive old discussions?

How do we create a sub-section?

On sub sections : I guess posting two posts would do the trick. Otherwise we can always put sections in posts

Sub section

Sub section

Plop

The question was how...

type "=" in VE mode will switch to section mode. Click on the bottom right icon </> to switch beetween WikiText and Visual edit mode. The last mode you used is reused on next post.

Archiving is useless in low traffic pages with Flow. Recent threads are up with "most recent topics" sorting and they are otherwise chronologically ordered.

If we want to index discussion for high traffic page, I guess a bot could create index pages or a special page could do list them the usual way. We should not try to just do anything as before with the new system.

You don't archive old discussions. They fall off the edge a la Facebook. You can reload old discussions by browsing all the way to the bottom of the page.

Just as before, a bot could howether create index pages by period of times, number of threads ...

When a discussion (old or not) is finished, it can also be marked as resolved. Then the discussion will be collapsed by default and thus take up less space in the topic list.

Oh, and I see it's also possible to write a summary conclusion … great.

Shall we close this then? It seems to me both questions are answered.

Please feel free. It's easy to reopen if anybody does not agree anyway :)

Maybe there should be a "Don't ask to close, close" advice.