Wikipedia:Flow
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As of October 2015, Flow is not in active development, following a decision by the Collaboration team to focus on developing workflow systems. It will be maintained and supported.
Hi everyone, here's a copy of the message from Dannyh:
For a while now, the Collaboration team has been working on Flow, the structured discussion system. I want to let you know about some changes in that long-term plan.
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.
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.
On behalf of the Collaboration team, Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 22:23, 1 September 2015 (UTC)
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The main goals for the Flow project are
In addition, experienced users often employ a suite of workarounds to help them manage and keep track of the many ongoing conversations that they're involved in, using tools that aren't necessarily well-suited to the task. For example, watchlists and diffs are page-level tools, making it hard to distinguish between the conversations that users are interested in and the ones that they're not. Experienced users can waste a lot of time checking diffs on an active talk page, especially if the most active conversation isn't the one that they're interested in following. (Of course, this problem is somewhat mitigated by the steadily decreasing levels of overall talk page participation -- see above -- but that decreasing participation is a symptom of deeper problems, and cannot be considered a solution which makes it easier to follow the ever-dwindling number ongoing of per-page conversations.)
We believe that user expectations for a modern discussion system are increasingly diverging from the reality of talk pages today, and that all of our users deserve discussion and collaboration software that meets their needs.
Talk pages—as a discussion technology—are antiquated and are not intuitive.
Many things about the culture that has grown up around talk pages (such as "talkback" templates or being able to edit other people's comments) are confusing. That is not to say those conventions are wrong, merely not what those users are prepared for.
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