వికీపీడియా:ఫ్లో

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ఫ్లో
ఫ్లో ప్రాజెక్టు ప్రధాన పేజీ సముదాయాన్ని ఇందులో భాగం చేయటానికి ప్రణాళిక వార్తావాహిని తరచూ అడిగే ప్రశ్నలు రూపకల్పనకు సంబంధించిన ప్రశ్నలు రూపకల్పన, అభివృద్ధి Requirements for the first release Interactive prototype mw:Extension:Flow (కోడు) పూర్వరంగం, పరిశోధన (అన్నిలింకులూ మీడియావికీ.ఆర్గ్ కి వెళతాయి) వాడుకరుల అనుభవాలు పరిశోధన వాడుకరుల ప్రయోగపు డేటా అనుభవం పొందిన వాడుకరుల స్పందనలు ఉపయోగించే సందర్భాలు

ప్రధాన వ్యాసం: mw:Flow

Flow is a planned (2013) improvement to talk pages and other non-article workflows in the MediaWiki software. It is not LiquidThreads, which is used at some Wikimedia Foundation websites (including the discussion page about Flow at Mediawiki), but not at the English Wikipedia. The developer page, with links to resources and status updates is located at mw:Flow Portal at MediaWiki.org.

As of May 2013, this project is just beginning and consequently there are no useable or testable versions available at this time. However, there is an interactive prototype (see link in the navigation box) that will demonstrate some of the features. The final product may look, feel, and behave very differently from this initial mock-up.

Conceptual goals

Users expect and deserve a modern and intuitive discussion interface.

Talk pages—as a discussion technology—are antiquated and user-hostile. Experienced editors lose a lot of valuable time dealing with people who can't figure out how to reply to messages or who need assistance with things like signing their posts.

Users are surprised by the cultural norms of the community.

Many things about the culture that has grown up around talk pages (such as "talkback" templates or being able to change other people's comments) are confusing or inefficient.

We believe that a modern user-to-user discussion system will improve the projects.

Better methods for collaboration will improve collaboration, which will help good editors be more productive.

Problems identified

The Wikimedia Foundation has studied how new editors use talk pages. This data is available online. Some of the major gaps between typical users' expectations and the old system are:

User Expectations Versus Reality in Discussion Systems

Expectation	Current reality
Easy to distinguish topics	Conversations that thread to infinite depth
Obvious and consistent comment authorship and automatic "signing"	Comment authorship manually added at the end of comment (by convention)
A "reply" button	Inconsistent reply system (whose talk page hosts the conversation?)
A simple comment field	Wikitext/code
Notifications of replies to all discussions	Notifications only when the conversation happens on their own talk page or their username is linked (see Wikipedia:Notifications)

Planned features

Comparison of old and planned user-talk discussion systems

What you do now	What you will do then
Leave a message at someone's user talk page	Leave a message at someone's user board
Watch a person's talk page	Subscribe to the person's board
Wonder whether the other editor will reply on your page or his/hers	Any reply will automatically appear in your feed
Keep checking the person's talk page for a reply	Any reply will automatically, immediately appear in your feed
Reply by clicking [Edit]	Reply by clicking a "Reply" button
Indent the conversation by typing a series of colons	Do nothing: replies are automatically indented
Sign your comment by typing ~~~~	Do nothing: your comments are always signed automatically
Leave {{talkback}} messages so the other user can find your reply or link their username (see Wikipedia:Notifications)	Do nothing: your reply will automatically appear in the other user's feed
Search for new messages on your talk page using page history and diffs	Have all new messages automatically appear on your feed, no matter where the original comment was on the page
Watch the whole user talk page, even though you only care about one conversation	Watch just the one conversation, if that's what you want
Edit your comment by clicking [Edit]	Edit your comment by clicking an edit button
You collapse an off-topic comment or thread.	You "close" an off-topic comment or thread.
You add a section heading, splitting one thread into two.	You enter "thread split" mode, select the posts to split, and create a new thread.
You remove a section heading, combining two threads into one.	You merge two threads.
You edit an inappropriate section heading.	You edit the heading.
You see that someone is top-posting and re-order the posts.	You do nothing: Posts will automatically be ordered correctly.
You are an admin and you revision-delete an "outing" comment.	You are an admin and you click the "delete" button to delete the user's post (which is right next to the "close" and "oversight" buttons in the prototype).
A bot delivers a weekly news digest to your talk page.	The bot can post a message to your board just like any other user.
You want to edit someone else's comments to fix an incorrect link, with or without the original person's permission.	Admins will be able to edit other people's comments; a userright might allow trusted non-admins to do the same.
You put together a series of diffs for use when reporting a situation on a noticeboard.	You simply link directly to each comment, with no need for a diff if you're showing the unedited comment. Any edits to the comment (by anyone) will be visibly noted.
You edit the wikitext source of a talk page to add or change a comment.	You use Flow to reply to/edit/create a discussion using the VisualEditor interface. Flow will use whatever features are available in VE at the time of release; features like math editing are planned for VE, but are not guaranteed to arrive by the time Flow does. A "fallback", lightweight wikitext editor will be available when users cannot use the VisualEditor interface, but it may and will not support all complex features of MediaWiki syntax. It is unknown at this time what features it will support.

Current plans indicate that there will be:

• No edit conflicts, ever.
• No {{unsigned}} posts in discussions—all posts and comments will be automatically signed and dated.
• No more need to tell new users how to sign their posts or how to indent their comments.
• No need to archive discussions—old posts will automatically "fall off" the page, and can be retrieved by scrolling down or searching for them.
• No way for inexperienced people to accidentally remove your posts or vandalize them.
• No "complete" wikitext editor, but a lightweight "fallback" editor supporting some wiki syntax will be available for users with technical or other problems (old browser/no JS, speech-to-text maybe, etc.).
• A place for an 'introduction' to the page, which can contain free-form text, user boxes, templates, etc.
• A way to close or hat old threads to prevent further replies.
• A way to link to previous discussions or individual comments.

Background

Flow activity process

Flow is the code name for a planned Wikimedia Foundation project. At first glance, Flow is a next generation discussion system—but that is only one part of it. Flow is actually a rethinking of how we do collaborative work in the projects. Initially, the key components of Flow are likely to include:

• The Feed module. This is a powerful way for users to have insight into their discussions and interests, and introduces several modern software conveniences (such as subscriptions and tagging)
• The User Discussion module. We are starting our focus only on what we call "User to user discussion" as these discussion types are not overly complex. As we learn more, we can expand the technology to cover additional cases
• A Workflow Description Language module. This will allow local wikis to create both simple and complex software workflows that work with in Flow. Example workflow ideas include:
  • A Block Module. This is an example of a specific user-discussion use case that is best solved in software.
  • A Welcome Module. This is an example of a specific use case that is best served in software rather than templates (think: welcome templates that are interactive and teach new users how to edit before they make mistakes).

In the future, Flow might grow to encompass all manner of tools, including:

• A Watchlist module
• A WikiProjects module
• Further Discussion modules to cover additional use cases (like !voting, noticeboards, the Teahouse, reference desks, article discussions, and so forth)

Primary use cases

The primary use cases that Flow's user-to-user discussion system attempts to solve are:

Ease of use

The User talk system of responding in Wikitext is user-hostile.

Fragmented discussions

It is difficult to determine where a discussion is to take place.

Determining what's new

There is no easy way to see what has changed in a discussion without resorting to complex, power-user behaviors (such as viewing the diff between the current revision and the last viewed revision).

Contextual interest

Users are required to watch all discussion topics, not just the ones they are involved in.

Ease of use

Using wikitext as a discussion system is antiquated, opaque, and frankly embarrassing in its difficulty. New users are often scared away by viewing talk pages. They are often afraid of "breaking" them and, once inside the code, don't have a clue about how to respond. There isn't a reply button. How do you indicate that you are replying to someone in particular? What are all these curly braces?

There are no discussion systems in the world that require users to sign their own posts.

Even reading talk pages is problematic. Users can quickly get lost within deeply threaded discussions. Think about every other kind of conversation you get involved in—in person, via physical letters, via email, via forum software, chat systems, blog comments—you always know who is speaking before you read (or hear) the words. Always. Only in talk pages do you not know who is talking until after the fact.

Fragmented discussions

When you leave a message on my talk pages, do I respond to you on my talk or yours? What happens if I do? How do you get notified if there are responses on my page? When I leave a message for you on your talk page and you respond to it, how am I alerted to this?

For many power users, using the watchlist to track conversations is useless. Some talk pages have such high activity that hundreds of responses to non-relevant topics are created per day. Some users will page back through their contributions to find changes (which is again a power user ploy and still doesn't display if there has been new activity).

Let's kill off {{talkback}} templates.

Determining what's new

Watchlists can tell us if there has been a change to a page, but determining what's changed requires a peek into the history. The typical way that one reads discussion pages on MediaWiki is by selecting different revisions and reading the diff. That is, frankly, crazy.

What's new should be obvious. You shouldn't have to resort to Black Magick and Other Trickery to keep up with a conversation. So let's fix that.

Contextual interest

When I post a new message on someone's talk page, I really only care about that message. I don't care about the tens of other topics that are happening there. And yet, if I want to watch for replies in my topic, I have to see everyone else's. On some high-volume talk pages, my topic (and unread responses) may very well be archived away before I get back to reading them!

Timeline

Currently unknown.

Announcements

Please post links or diffs to announcements made about this project to the English Wikipedia community.

• WP:Wikipedia Signpost/2013-02-11/Technology report - January engineering report published (brief mention)
• WP:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-08-06/Op-ed - The Athena Project: being bold
• WP:Wikipedia Signpost/2012-07-16/Technology report - Tech talks at Wikimania amid news of a mixed June (brief mention)
• WP:Village pump (technical)#Announcing the English Wikipedia Flow Portal (15 May 2013)
• WP:Village_pump (miscellaneous)/Archive 42#mw:Flow (7 May 2013)
• WP:Village pump (proposals)/Archive 93#Convert Village Pump to Wikia Community Forum software - August 2012 (numerous brief mentions)
• WP:Community Bulletin Board (May 2013)
• Wikipedia talk:Talk page guidelines (May 2013)
• lesser mentions listed on talkpage