Wikipedia:Flow

See also: mw:Structured Discussions

Flow, also known as Structured Discussions, is a project of the Global Collaboration team at the Wikimedia Foundation to build a different discussion and collaboration system for Wikimedia projects.

The name comes from Workflow and Flow (psychology).

Flow can replace the current Wikipedia talk page system and intends to provide certain features that are present on some other popular websites, but which are not easy to implement in wikitext.

For example, Flow automatically:

• signs posts,
• threads replies, and
• permits per-topic notifications.

With wikitext a bot is used to automatically sign posts that are unsigned.

However Flow also results in the loss of certain features within wikitext, such as:

• the ability to use the "history" tab to view all comments since one looked at the talk page last, and
• the ability to easily portray article content on talk pages.

The main goals for the Flow project were

• to make the wiki discussion system more accessible for new users.
• to make the wiki discussion system more efficient for experienced users.
• to encourage meaningful conversations that support collaboration.

Former and current deployments

Flow was uninstalled from English Wikipedia in November 2016, by request from the community.
There are currently no plans for it to return to English Wikipedia.

Flow is currently deployed on:

• several talk pages on Mediawiki.org and on
• various language Wikipedias.

You might encounter it on other Wikimedia wikis however.

Contact and links

On Structured Discussions:

• A much more indepth discription is in mediawiki.org: [[1]]

• You can also view this about Structured Discussions on Phabricator: open tasks, all tasks, or submit a new task.

On Global Collaboration:

• Global Collaboration development team roles and responsibilities
• Global Collaboration team IRC channel: #wikimedia-collaboration^connect
• Collaboration-Team triage board on Phabricator