Wikipedia:Wikipedia Signpost/2015-09-30/Tech news

I thought Flow had shuffled off this mortal coil and joined the choir invisibule?--ukexpat (talk) 00:50, 4 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

No, it's just dropped on the priority list. Some wikis do already use Flow, for the record.Jo-Jo Eumerus (talk, contributions) 19:25, 4 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

ukexpat, there tend to be "communication problems" with the WMF. I've spend a lot of time on the WMF wikis, and I've spoken with the executive director, the Flow project manager, and others. Here's what's really going on... for starters the executive director said she's converting her own talk page to Flow. When I posted a crazy list of catastrophic problems with Flow(*), she took it as a bug report and thanked me for helping us get the software to where it needs to be, and it is a process of constant tuning and eventually getting it ready for prime-time. The programmers hate having to support wikitext, and they believe wikitext is scaring away millions of new editors. They're working towards a Glorious New Future where wiktext is *gone*.

The WMF announced that Flow development was being put on hold.... here's what they really meant. The Flow-chatboard features mostly-work, so that work is now titled "bug fixes" instead of "development". In addition, the Flow team is shifting to development of different Flow features under the title "Workflow". See how simple that is? The WMF said development of New Flow Discussion Features was put on hold, and obviously everyone in the community just has a reading-comprehension-problem when we thought the Flow-Train came to a halt.

(*)Note: When I said "catastrophic problems with Flow", I meant copy-paste mangled content. Reverting an edit mangled the original post. Switching between Flow's two editing modes mangled what I had typed in. The result displayed immediately after a save was different from what everyone would see in the future, when the page was properly loaded anew. Flow uses top-posting for some comments and bottom-posting for other comments, which turns large discussions into incomprehensible spaghetti. Flow is made of various subsystems, there's the editing interface and the parser and the back-end storage system.... each of which independently crashed on me at various times. There's no proper history of the discussion, clicking a history-date shows you ONE comment, entirely out of context. (And some history links would just crash). Oh yeah, and during testing some of my private info accidentally got sucked into a copy paste.... and they never implemented oversight. Instead of oversight, one of the devs had to basically hack into the database set it so that Flow would CRASH if anyone tried to view the deleted post. There were various other problems, but as I said, these are just some of the "catastrophic" ones.

One big reason for many of those issues is that Flow doesn't actually support wikitext, it pretends to support wikitext. If you type wikitext into Flow, Flow throws it away and stores something completely different. Then when you try to look at the code for the page again, Flow tries to invent a new blob of wikitext that (hopefully) resembles what you had there originally. Yeah yeah, I know... that sounds insane... but the important thing is that the programmers like it better.... and none of it will matter anyway once we can get rid of wikitext completely. You know, because we'll get millions of new editors jumping on board if we can get rid of all this scary wikitext.

Oh yeah, and they are finishing up a new system that will let people opt-in to switching their UserTalk page to Flow. The current plan is to only enable it on wikis that approve it. Alsee (talk) 11:39, 10 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]

A couple of quick clarifications.

They're working towards a Glorious New Future where wiktext is *gone*. This is not accurate. They are working to make both systems available as options, for the diversity of humans who might prefer one or the other. Wikimarkup is powerful, and appreciated by many of us, and there are no plans to remove it. Please don't start baseless rumours.

they never implemented oversight - This is not true. 3 other oversighters tested the system immediately after this bug report, and found it to work as expected. The particular instance that you are talking about, is currently attributed to either a brief caching problem, or human error.

I will not rebut some of the other points, but thank you for clarifying that Flow is not dead, and the team is simply refocusing on other aspects and extensions (particular Echo) for some time. Quiddity (WMF) (talk) 16:05, 10 October 2015 (UTC)[reply]