Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Flow released to English Wikipedia

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Title[edit]

  • New Wikipedia discussion software ready for beta testing
  • Breakfast of champions: first trial release of Flow is under way
  • ... ?

Body[edit]

Intro

The Core Features team is proud to announce that the first version of Flow, a limited opt-in trial on a few group discussion spaces, is live on English Wikipedia and ready for testing by the community.

Flow is a new discussion and collaboration system for Wikimedia projects intended to make user-to-user discussion easier, faster, and more enjoyable. Because of the complexity of all the processes that happen on discussion pages today – everything from reporting and stopping vandalism on our projects to reaching consensus on controversial topics – Flow is being built iteratively and released gradually to the community in the initial stages of development. During this first phase, we're asking WikiProjects who are interested in being a part of a Flow trial to enable the software in their group discussion space, use it, and give us feedback and suggestions for new features.

Unlike the freeform wikitext discussions that take place on talk pages today, Flow features a structured interface with atomic discussion elements, allowing you to see the participants and number of comments in each discussion, and to toggle threads open and closed. You can easily start a new topic or reply to existing topics and posts with the click of a button, moderate inappropriate content, and customize your Flow page with a configurable header.

In the near future, we'll be working to add more features, such as the ability to close and summarize topics, thank discussion participants for their posts, and show updated content in real time. We'll also be working to improve the look and feel of Flow, so that it reflects both modern design standards and the values of our mission.

Future
  • Our plans after this release
  • Links & CTA

Notes[edit]

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