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This is an archived version of this page, as edited by MarcoAurelio (talk | contribs) at 12:25, 31 December 2016 (→Proposal to remove Flow on Meta-Wiki). It may differ significantly from the current version.

Latest comment: 9 years ago by MarcoAurelio in topic Flow
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Flow

Latest comment: 9 years ago87 comments27 people in discussion

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

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)Reply
You mean this one? The discussion is taking place on Wikimedia Forum for some reason. --MZMcBride (talk) 05:05, 27 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
Where is Flow enabled, appart from Talk:Flow/Developer test page? —MarcoAurelio 13:16, 27 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
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)Reply
Thanks, that was what I was looking for. Maybe we should move it here. --MF-W 20:17, 27 November 2016 (UTC)Reply

Enabling flow on one page (Research:ORES paper)

The following discussion is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section. A summary of the conclusions reached follows.
In my humble point of view I feel there's no community support for the proposal. —MarcoAurelio 18:53, 24 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
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)Reply

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)Reply
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)Reply
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)Reply
  • Oppose 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)Reply
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)Reply
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)Reply
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)Reply
  • Support 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)Reply
    • 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)Reply
  • I have no issue with this. – Ajraddatz (talk) 02:43, 26 November 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support 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)Reply
  • 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)Reply
  • 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)Reply

┌─────────────────────────────────┘
 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)Reply

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)Reply
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)Reply
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)Reply
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)Reply
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)Reply
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)Reply
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)Reply
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)Reply
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)Reply

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

I made [1]. HTH, Elitre (WMF) (talk) 08:09, 16 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Oppose 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)Reply
  • 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)Reply
  • 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)Reply
  • 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)Reply
  • I think that the community recently expressed that they don't want Flow enabled on Meta, and I see no consensus either to enable it here as well, even on a single page. —MarcoAurelio 16:18, 24 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
The above discussion is preserved as an archive. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section.

Improper closing of discussion

MarcoAurelio has closed the above discussion with the following statement: "In my humble point of view I feel there's no community support for the proposal." There are two serious issues with closing this discussion.

  1. This summary of the discussion is untrue to a simple observation. There is obviously *some* community support for the proposal. In fact, all contributors who would be affected by support of the proposal have shown full support. Any closing authority should note this in their summary. As it stands, this summary of the discussion is clearly not a good-faith summary of what took place in the discussion.
  2. The discussion had not ended. There were open questions that had yet to be addressed. I'll restate mine: Can those opposing state clearly how they will be negatively affected by this specific proposal? The discussion is not complete until these questions are addressed or have clearly been purposefully left unaddressed. Explicitly choosing to not address questions like this should be considered when closing. Regardless, closing the discussion before those who were questioned about their reasoning have a chance to respond is obviously premature.

In my assessment, MarcoAurelio has closed this discussion inappropriately and we should re-open the discussion *after* the popular set of winter/solstice holidays that are currently keeping people away from their activities online. --EpochFail (talk) 17:52, 28 December 2016 (UTC) I've edited my statement to strike "-faith" from my assertion of the quality of the summary statement of the closing admin. I did not intend to accuse MarcoAurelio of operating in bad-faith, but rather had intended to make a statement about the qualities of the summary. I regret for causing hurt feelings and I hope that this explicit action will serve as consolation. --EpochFail (talk) 00:48, 30 December 2016 (UTC)Reply

After reading your allegations, my closure stands, but any other admin is free to reopen it if it feels it is indeed improper. Let me explain:
  • The discussion has lasted a month. That's a fair ammount of time even for Meta, and the majority of the regulars here disagree with using Flow in this project on any way. Several proposals have been raised and all of them have failed, including that one.
  • Your arguments looks more emotional than policy based. Having some support is not the same as having community support, and the true and real community of this site do not want this feature here, no matter how good the intentions of the people involved here are.
  • Demanding explanations only for those who oppose but not to those who support as well subdues those set of users unfairly and mean that the opinion of those people should be given less weight. That's not how we work here. If they don't want to answer the questions they're in their right to do so and their opinions shouldn't be disregarded.
  • I feel that my closure reflects the feelings of the Meta-Wiki community towards your proposal. I could have written a more complex, flourished statement, but the result would be the same: there's no consensus.
  • I'm also not buying the argument of the Christmas hollydays. The section above shows pretty clearly that Meta-Wiki folks are still here and, moreover, a) that the closure was not innapropriate and, b) that reopening the discussion when 99% of the people of this project is against this feature would be a waste of our valuable time.
I'd also appreciate if you could present evidence of your accusations towards me that I've acted in bad faith or I'll have to consider that as a personal attack.
Thank you, —MarcoAurelio 19:16, 28 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
Currently your comment in the discussion you closed looks as if you provided an opinion in the discussion, and then closed it favoring the same way as your comment. That seems rather improper to me. Legoktm (talk) 08:32, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
If you mean the last comment to the discussion above and the closure at the top, they're both closing comments. Please, assume good faith. Thanks. —MarcoAurelio 10:52, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
Fortunately, the inactivity around this holiday is not a matter of debate. See https://quarry.wmflabs.org/query/15128 as evidence that there's currently a substantial activity drop around this time of year on meta. MarcoAurelio, can I ask you if you see me as a member of the Meta Community? How about Jtmorgan? Or Guillom? Surely my admin status means that I'm, to some extent, a member of the Meta community. I've been contributing here for years. The three of us have built most of the content in the Research namespace and we regularly bring new researchers and research to Meta. We are a legitimate subset of the Meta Community. Your comments imply otherwise. Also, I have not accused you of anything except improperly closing the discussion. I've said nothing about your intentions. --EpochFail (talk) 15:30, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
Please don't go circling and presente evidence now on where I have acted in bad faith as you said ([...] bad faith summary) or strike it. I've been volunteering on Wikimedia sites for nearly 10 years and I've always had my best intentions on it. If you still think my closure is innapropriate you can challenge it to the other bureaucrats of the site. I still think that my closure reflects the feelings of the community, and the discussion above makes it quite clear if it was any doubt. Moreover, if the discussion was not ended, why Trizek (WMF) was so eager to convert that page into a Flow board on 19 December? Is there any interest of talking about that? —MarcoAurelio 15:45, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
MarcoAurelio, I'm still not seeing where I have accused you of bad-faith. I was making a statement about the nature of your summary. As I said, a "good-faith summary of what took place in the discussion" would acknowledge all points argued. Saying that there was "no support" is obviously not true. What did you hope to achieve through saying that there was "no support"? For your other question, it seems that MZMcBride had noted on phabricator that "There's certainly not unanimous support for this request, but I think there's consensus to move forward." and after that, the change was made. I was under no impression that this conversation needed to be closed. --EpochFail (talk) 00:33, 30 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
I don't understand why it's acceptable to ask that «those opposing state clearly how they will be negatively affected» by something. Are opinions now valid only if produced by personal interest? I thought we still had some superordinate goals and that the discussions were meant to find consensus on what's the common good; it's strange to read multiple people advocating for the elimination of altruism. I can certainly oppose something that will negatively affect others. Nemo 11:04, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
Hey Nemo. I feel that those who supported the proposal have made their case quite clear. Can you give me a counter-example? At the very least, those who have shown support are gesturing towards the *proposal itself* which is a relatively clearly stated argument. On the other hand, I feel like those in opposition have not provided an argument from which to discuss. "I don't want it" or "It's bad" is not an argument that can be discussed. "This proposal failed before" is neither true nor an argument. (I'd withdrawn the proposal until the maintenance plan of Flow was clear and we could continue the discussion.) Regardless your altruism argument falls flat because the vast majority of those who would be directly affected by this change have signaled support for it (literally everyone but you). You still haven't even addressed the fact that Flow works better for newcomers because the only empirical evidence that we have makes that clear. You haven't addressed my direct experience working with external researchers on talk pages or even discussed the potential boon to our projects it would have if we could get them doing their research the Wikimedian way on Meta. If you'd give me some counter-arguments against the merit of the proposal, I'd address them rather than simply repeating my own. --EpochFail (talk) 15:30, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
Now tell me if this is not some sort of harassment towards those who voted against the proposal the continuous and ad nauseam calls to justify themselves over and over. —MarcoAurelio 15:47, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
Just catching up on this. I was surprised that a proposal to ban Flow always-and-forever from MetaWiki was opened on Christmas eve, and then closed four days later. And that the closing admin justified their closure with the argument that "Meta-Wiki folks are still here" and "99% of the people in this project are against the feature". Furthermore although I have been working on this wiki for almost 6 years now, in both a volunteer and a staff capacity, I've been instructed not to participate in this discussion with my staff account. So apparently I am not a real member of the Meta community, as either a volunteer or a member of the staff? This baffles me. In any case, if the participants in this discussion wish to escalate this conversation to another forum, I'm open to participating there (assuming I'm allowed to). But I no longer have any confidence in the current process, and do not believe that further participation in this discussion is productive. Jtmorgan (talk) 20:51, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
There is a misunderstanding: #Proposal to remove Flow on Meta-Wiki is not closed, although the harsh meta-comments have certainly succeeded in discouraging further participation. Nemo 21:03, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
Nobody forbids you to comment, Jtmorgan. Not me, not anybody; but if you've been here for so long you'll remember that concerns have been expressed several times when staff accounts are used for non staff issues. Do as you wish, but if you think it's better for you not to participate it's your choice. What I ask anyone is that they comment and they let comment the others in a paceful and constructive way. It is not correct to constatly ask the voters to justify why they vote one way or another. That indeed discourages participation (and I'll say that it's forbidden from the wiki I came from, but that's another subject). That's all. And please if my language is unclear, say so, I'm just en-2. About the closure, no comments. I've clarified the closure of the other discussion above and I stand by it, as I did it in good faith and honestly believe that's the consensus from the participants here. Ironically, the discussion had no point in continuing since Trizek (WMF) enabled the Flow board on the page, which I've just noticed some hours ago. EpochFail says that the discussion didn't ended to challenge the closure. How funny, because then the enabling of the Flow on that page shouldn't have happened either. I'd hope this is not that the Flow team wishes to push this feature ignoring the communities, because then, maybe, we should be having a word with their bosses about this questionable behaviour. And as always, I'm willing to be corrected if I'm wrong, but I'm not going to tolerate being insulted as EpochFail did just because the result does not please him. —MarcoAurelio 21:28, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
I did not intend to insult you, but rather to question the quality of your closing statement which is clearly an inaccurate representation of events. --EpochFail (talk) 00:43, 30 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
I think MarcoAurelio's closure was quite correct. It is also very ridiculous how Research_talk:ORES_paper is now a flow page, despite the closure (and am I seeing correctly that it does not even support indentation of "replies"?!) --MF-W 00:19, 30 December 2016 (UTC)Reply

Jeblads summary :D

Some point from me on pro and cons for Flow. And no, I don't want to discuss LiquidThreads. There is a lot of arguing whether Flow is an active project, and as far as it is available on Wikimedia-projects it is active. Someone claiming the project to be "bad" in some way, without substantiating the claim, does not hold as a valid claim, it is just an opinion. Then there is the evil conspiracy to take over Meta and turn it into a huge Flow-table. Nope, won't happen.

Pro
  • Clearer reply structure, what do you actually reply to
  • It is easy to insert remarks to previous replies (branch on necessity)
  • Can use VE-style editing, yet wikitechies can use their wikiweirdietexties
  • Permanent link is truly permanent compared to fragment links to sections
  • Rant can easily be hidden
  • Threads can be summarized
  • Voting on replies are possible, even if not implemented (mumble)
  • Reusing thread on different pages, even if not yet implemented (2xmumble)
Cons
  • If you disagree with the last reply it is not clear how you make this visible
  • Lot of whitespace (is this a valid functional point?)
  • Can make confusing wikitext (user links etc.)
  • Not obvious how to show in wide layout (you remove the rightmost column to make another wider)
  • Permanent link is gibberish (can this be readable for first entry with a given title?)
  • A thread can not easily be read in full, ie. you do it by opening the permanent link
  • Some oldtimers does not get it how they switch between edit modes (perhaps because the symbols doesn't appear clickable [Oh, they are blue now!])
  • Special chars not available (not sure if this is a Flow-problem)
  • People like to "pin" badges on the discussion page, and it is not obvious how to do that

I can't really see any good arguments for not using Flow on a single page, but I can see room for improvements of the extension as such. — Jeblad 08:48, 24 December 2016 (UTC)Reply

Proposal to remove Flow on Meta-Wiki

Given that enwiki has been allowed to opt-out and that several attempts to get this enabled here have failed in all fashions (Flow in all talk pages, then in a namespace, then as beta feature on talk pages and now on a single page), I think that it is time to end this recurring discussion and decide if we want to opt-out from this feature entirely. Thanks. —MarcoAurelio 16:23, 24 December 2016 (UTC)Reply

  • Support Support due to no community consensus to use it here and repeated failed attempts to enable it. —MarcoAurelio 16:25, 24 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Support, was enabled abusively. Nemo 18:37, 24 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Support yep please. Using flow on meta is not a good idea for me. --Ks-M9 [disc.] 22:02, 24 December 2016 (UTC).Reply
  • Support Support per above. --Steinsplitter (talk) 09:02, 26 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Support - seriously, just LET IT GO!, it was possibly one of the worst waste of WMF money ever. They should have renamed it to 'Totally Flawed'--Stemoc 09:20, 26 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Support This totally useless, non inclusive to people who use old computers, have a bad internet connection and old browsers, need to go.--AldNonymousBicara? 11:13, 26 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Support per above. Defender (talk) 15:35, 26 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Support definately. —Ah3kal (talk) 17:08, 26 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Support per above. KPFC 💬 17:55, 26 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Oppose Oppose Agree it needs work but we need to be looking at new tech to engage new editors, not just throwing out every attempt. When wikis started they were more intuitive to use than regular ways of designing webpages, now they are significantly less so, and that needs to be fixed. – Ajraddatz (talk) 18:08, 26 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Support - Ugh... this again. WMF needs to stop raising the barrier for everyone to contribute and let the existing systems work. ~ Matthewrbowker Drop me a note 18:11, 26 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
    Did you read the discussion above? It's about using Flow to *lower* the barrier for new contributors. Legoktm (talk) 08:42, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
    Yes, and I disagree with it. I find flow very difficult to use, when it does work. In fact, your argument about "lowering the barrier" is the same one presented when Visual Editor was forced onto wikis, with roughly the same result (note: My three tries with visual editor resulted in in two "undefined error" and one lost save). Trying to find something on mw.org involves trying to remember a random ID. And invariably, the reply button is disabled or non-existant. ~ Matthewrbowker Drop me a note 20:02, 30 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Support per above. --Az1568 (talk) 19:45, 26 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Support per above. -- Freddy2001 talk 20:18, 26 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Considering all attempts (enable flow everywhere, in research only, on a single page, as described by MarcoAurelio above) to introduce this feature have failed, this here is the only logical consequence. I couldn't agree less with Ajraddatz that we should be introducing features the community has rejected, especially features where no major further rollouts are planned in the future, just to feel more "modern". Especially on meta, "engaging new editors" is not really the top priority … --Vogone (talk) 21:09, 26 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Support. While I do agree with Ajraddatz's statemenent that we need new editors engagement, the kind of editors we need on Meta is somewhat high tiered in terms of wiki skills. E.g. we need translators who would not mess up, we need translate admins who must learn a deal of extra wikimark-up plus crazy use cases for it, we need admins who know how to admin, we need people writing grant proposals who can deal with all those complex tables and whatever what is now part of the pages' layout, we need people creating and expanding pages about some projects, either outreachish (but who know about outreachwiki) or onwiki — that all needs good wikimark-up knowledge, as does drafting posts for blog and well I guess writing research materials. I am not talking about being parser functions guru for the latter ones, but article-level wikicode is a must, IMHO. I actually struggle to find a real example of where we would need a complete noob showing up. Perhaps research namespace is indeed the most truth-like example, but come on, the guys go to research Wikimedia and cannot learn the language Wikimedians are using? Sounds a bit fraudish with all the due respect(, just in case I have absolutely no intentions to offend someone or anyone). With all that being said is it such a problem to count the number of colons and indent your post with one more? There are some CSS techniques for those who struggle to understand which reply is to which comment, and that's probably the only real problem appearing here. Does Flow solve anything? I highly doubt it. Actually LT was better, in my opinion, since we are mentioning it here. But they both are too raw and the only place where their pros beat cons is the Wikinews Comments namespace. With current status of Flow it is also clear that those gibberish topic names and all the rest of problems are either never or almost never going to be solved, and while helping some theoretical not able to submerge into wikicode newbies it will make a hell of an experience for admins and experienced users. Come on, I actually loathe using talk pages on Mediawiki.org now, since it implies waiting forever till the page loads and then having to find how the heck to reply in the way you want. So please do not spread this thing any further, and it is past time for its roots to be plucked. --Base (talk) 00:21, 28 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
    I actually struggle to find a real example of where we would need a complete noob showing up. That's just wrong. You interpret a "complete noob" as someone who is entirely clueless. In this case, wikitext discussions are holding back people who are fully competent in their own respective fields, and are struggling with wikitext. We WANT their contributions. Legoktm (talk) 08:40, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
    Entirely clueless about wiki to be precise. Basic knowledge of wikitext is something which is within the baremost minimum, IMO. I also believe that knowing that minimum is also a prerequisite to research wiki. Just as if you research China it looks logical to at least have a clue about the language, even if you are a culture researcher and not a linguist. I am not talking about some even slightly advanced wiki stuff, I emphasise on this. Besides the respective field in question in the case of ORES is probably AI. Now come on, that high tech thing is easy for them while some silly mark-up is not? I might believe that psychology or other humanities specialists would struggle first 30 minutes of experience but not those guys… What we have now is some theoretical people struggling with wikicode on the one hand and on the other hand existing editors me including who just cannot work in Flow. Even though I like theories in general… --Base (talk) 12:26, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Support per above —JuniorX2 ChatHello! 00:38, 28 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Someone sang - let it go. (If this isn't obvious, Support Support.) — regards, Revi 05:36, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • This entire discussion is ridiculous. I'm trying to figure out how everyone participating in this discussion is negatively affected by the existence of Research talk:ORES paper and I can't. It's mostly just "I don't approve, so they can't get their work done". And that's disappointing to me, since I'd much rather encourage people to hold their discussions in public on our normal wikis. Legoktm (talk) 08:40, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
    • Well, for one, I'm interested in Research:ORES paper, but I'm now unable to participate in its talk page. Some people have expressed their concerns about Flow and their fears that disabling the extension completely is the only way to prevent its future expansion; this opinion might feel harsh, but it doesn't look ridiculous or irrational to me. Nemo 10:37, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
    • This section is not about Research_talk:ORES_paper; it is about the whole of Meta. --MF-W 00:23, 30 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Since this is a request for a site configuration change, please let me test here the Technical Collaboration Guideline (a draft welcoming your feedback). The recommendation for community decisions is to submit blockers in order to identify the specific problems of a software product. This would allow the Flow project / the Wikimedia Foundation Collaboration team to have actionable items to discuss and work for. If you want to proceed with this request, could you identify these blockers, please?--Qgil-WMF (talk) 09:39, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
    • The blockers have been expressed on mw:Talk:Flow and other relevant talk pages, for years now. Let's not pretend users never articulated their issues. Whoever at WMF is interested in understanding more can read the LQT and Flow reports (3975 and counting) and the various discussions, to understand what problems the users have. As for me, I articulated some of the hard blockers in my messages between December 2012 and February 2013 (don't ask me for direct links, I have no idea how to get something out of Flow archives), and they've never been solved; a Product Manager has then declared that it's too late to solve any of those design issues. Nemo 10:47, 29 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
      • A proposal is being made to remove Flow from Meta. I think it is fair to ask the Meta community for the specific problems of the software that are considered blockers for its use in this wiki. If the Meta community is able to agree on specific blockers, then this proposal will be stronger and actionable. Different communities have different priorities. While some Wikimedia communities decide to keep Flow away for now (true), others want more of it as soon as possible (also true). Therefore, pointing generally to mediawiki.org talk pages, Phabricator projects or the feedback of one community member to a product manager years ago is not really useful to deduce what blockers motivate MarcoAurelio to make this proposal here today, and others to second it.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 08:14, 30 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
        • It's also not useful to ask for volunteers to do more work for something they're not interested in. Nemo 09:07, 30 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
          • If someone is proposing to remove a software product altogether, isn't it fair to ask what are the main problems of such software product? Agreeing on 1-5 blockers shouldn't be hard for a community agreeing that Flow is totally unfit for their wiki. Identifying specific blockers is also useful to have more productive conversations and to lead further development in some direction. Adoption is an indirect reason (users and communities adopt software or not based on specific factors). Adoption is analyzed better when users at large are actually free to adopt the software. This is not the situation in Meta, where enabling a single Flow page generates a harsh discussion. Other Wikimedia communities have been more open about trying Flow in real scenarios, getting a wider diversity of users to use Flow, and they are providing specific feedback about what needs to be fixed or improved first.--Qgil-WMF (talk) 10:35, 31 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
            • Quim, please, don't start now demanding explanations about this. I think Nemo bis and all others before me and the 4 failed previous proposals have said why they don't want Flow on Meta, but it seems you've decided to ignore it and go forward. I do not think that's okay. I am sorry if this frustrates the Flow team. Rather to ask for explanations for removing an experimental software, I think it'd have been rather more productive to ask for opinions before enabling it everywhere, and on Meta specifically. Bon Nadal i Any proper. —MarcoAurelio 12:25, 31 December 2016 (UTC)Reply
  • Support Support: I'm sympathetic to the argument that Flow will be isolated to a specific talk page, but Flow is dead software. The deactivation of the extension on the English Wikipedia is very strong evidence of this, in my opinion. Myself and others tried repeatedly to tell people to not use Meta-Wiki as a test area for experimental software and those concerns were ignored. The natural consequence of this—a sharp rebuke of the extension—is pretty predictable.

    The biggest issue I have with Flow is that very few people seem to want it. Maybe Legoktm or EpochFail or someone else can explain why Flow is in such a state that users are not saying "when will my home wiki be next to get this great tool?!" What's sad to me is not that there's a discussion to disable Flow on Meta-Wiki with strong support. As I said, I think this response was easy to see coming. What's truly sad to me is that as we enter 2017, we still have a pretty horrible discussion system and no viable alternatives. Trying to blame or shame users to accept Flow is the absolute wrong approach. In my mind, if users aren't looking at the software and saying "oooh, I want that today," then the problem lies with the software. We've seen time and again new features introduced to the wikis without objection and sometimes with fanfare and joy. The problem is not change, the problem is that people have tried and then really disliked using Flow. Make something that people want to use. Build a carrot, not a stick. I don't know how many other ways I can say this or how many times we have to go through a failed software development process before this lesson takes hold. --MZMcBride (talk) 02:54, 31 December 2016 (UTC)Reply

AbuseFilter monitoring

Latest comment: 9 years ago11 comments8 people in discussion

Hello. I'd like to be able to monitor all abuse filter hits over IRC thus I'm asking for permission to enable $wgAbuseFilterNotificationsPrivate for this wiki so I can monitor all abusefilter hits, included those of private filters via IRC. No filter content or private details will be disclosed to the IRC (irc.wikimedia) server, but by default filter hits on private filters ain't reported. Thanks. —MarcoAurelio 16:14, 24 December 2016 (UTC)Reply

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