Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions/Flow

I just got aware, that the software for Flow is installed even on projects, that don't want it at all. What is necessary for a project, to completely uninstall anything of the extension from the project software?

Afaik enWP and Meta somehow are lucky enough not to be bothered by Flow, what has the deWP to do to be free as well? Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 19:11, 3 September 2017 (UTC)

P.S.: Possible options:

• Just start a phab-ticket by any admin, and get it done.
• Have a de:WP:Umfrage beforehand
• Have a binding decision per de:WP:Meinungsbild beforehand (after that, it's of course necessary to uninstall it, but is it really necessary?)

Structured discussions ("Flow") will not be activated on wikis that didn't previously use it. No structured discussion board will be created on German Wikipedia unless if the community requests it.

Uninstalling the Flow software from a wiki is a moderately complicated option that would require precious developer time. We are not going to spend this time groundlessly to remove Flow from wikis. We will continue to work on the extension to improve it for those that use it. We will focus on communities that expect to see changes on the structured discussion systems they use.

We are not going to spend this time groundlessly to remove Flow from wikis.

Flow was uninstalled from EnWiki based on what was essentially an amicable agreement between myself, Quiddity, and whomever Quiddity reported to. We agreed that an RFC would clearly result in consensus to uninstall. We agreed that it was in the best interest of good-relations between the community and WMF to reach an amicable resolution, forgoing the planned RFC on the subject.

Flow was uninstalled from MetaWiki based on an overwhelming RFC consensus.

@Jdforrester (WMF), my question is whether:

1. A DeWiki Umfrage (a low formalities RFC) is sufficient grounds to remove Flow; or
2. a DeWiki Meinungsbild (an extremely formalized RFC) is sufficient grounds to remove Flow; or
3. are you reversing the WMF's position and asserting that community consensus no longer constitutes grounds for uninstalling Flow?

There are tons of structured discussions on deWP, just not with this extreme inflexible Flow junk, but normal structured ones. Stop with this straw-man about structured discussions, this Flow is just some weak forum impersonation, not even remotely something like a "structured discussion".

Start implementing VE on talk pages, don't go on deliberately omit it there to give Flow some rigged advantage. And let the devs do something useful instead of wasting time for Flow, let them develop indentation and auto-signing for VE, to improve the existing structured discussion pages in all wikis. Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 21:37, 6 September 2017 (UTC)

@Sänger, I've asked you before to improve your tone. I suggest you revise your post to "Please stop with this straw-man about...".

I believe you will find it much more effective and rewarding to maintain a professional tone, and when necessary, organize a community consensus.

We are powerless when we come here as ranting individuals. We are powerful when we come here as servants of community consensus.

But the insistence on the creation of a rift between a structured discussion and normal talk pages, that usually are structured discussions, is nothing but a en:Straw man.

Flow creates a deep rift between completely inflexible pages called Flow pages, designed for just the one proclaimed goal to make chit-chat easier, with disregard for every other use-case and the look-and-feel of the rest of the wikiverse with its everywhere nearly the same page behaviour.

Implementing VE on talk pages on the other hand would make the structuring of discussions on talk pages probably easier, would keep the coherent look-and-feel across the wikiverse, and keep the talk pages as flexible as they are needed. Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 13:33, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

Your "But..." doesn't matter. "Shut up" is considered an abusive tone. You should remove those words. You should also maintain a more professional tone in the future.

I believe you know that you&I are generally in agreement about the technical issues. I believe you know you that I found Superprotect to be offensive, abusive, and unacceptable. If that is not sufficiently clear, I will make it clear: The WMF can do almost anything because they hold the power switch. However the one thing they can never do is shut off all editing. It would be a severe error if the WMF were to repeat a Superprotect type Nuclear war. The community holds the bigger nuclear weapons, and the community may decide not to withhold nuclear retaliation next time. A nuclear conflict could escalate to the point that the community posts banners on all articles: "Please stop donating, the Foundation is wasting and misusing your money." That banner would include a graph showing the shocking and exponential growth in Foundation donations. That would be headline news across the globe. That would be bad. Everyone loses a nuclear war. However the WMF would lose the nuclear war AND lose the issue they were fighting over.

Personal attacks are also considered unacceptable. Any staff member would be fired if they talked to us with the language and tone that you use against WMF staff. If you continue to use that kind of language and tone, you may be blocked from editing mediawiki. Your efforts clearly are not working. Your tone only undermines the efforts of myself and other community members, when WMF staff members view the community as unreasonable and abusive.

It is reasonable to disagree with the WMF. It is appropriate to criticize actions. But maintain a professional tone and avoid personal attacks. They do not work. They are counter productive. They are unacceptable. They will get you blocked.

This wiki is covered by the Code of Conduct, as you have been warned before. Your comment is not in keeping with its requirements for respectful, civil discourse. Please edit your reply to comply with the community standards of this wiki. If you continue to speak in this fashion, I will report this issue to committee

Is there anything in the code of conduct about employees of the communities, who impersonate decision makers, for what they< are only entitled with full vetting by the highest entities, that is the community?

What could be done with people, who act against the communities by withholding technical solutions for personal and/or institutional vain from the communities, like it's done with the VE on talk pages? And who refuse to give meaningful answers in discussions, that don't aghrere with their POV? Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 04:25, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

I believe any discussion showing a reasonable consensus will be acceptable. The WMF has been activating Flow on some wikis based on informal discussions with just two or three 'support' comments.

(Really, you should remove Flow from MediaWiki as it complicates the consumer-developer communication… Did noone ever think about this?)

I don't really understand why you say uninstalling Flow on dewiki isn't an option if enwiki and meta did it before. Can you please explain that to me?

@Sänger: I don't know if you're aware of this, but the wikimedia tech community has a consentual opinion that insulting each other instead of an reasonable conversation isn't helpful at all and will be banned quite fast. Sadly, dewiki built a tolerance towards such behavior, but that doesn't mean you can behave like this elsewhere and don't get negative feedback.

I deleted the insulting part, at least I think so. What's still insulting?

I think it is insulting to proclaim VE is not for talk pages, while this is just not the case.

It is insulting to talk about this software as "structured discussions", while nearly all talk pages contain structured discussions, some even more and better structured than Flow is able to deliver.

It is insulting to make a survey based on completely bogus assumptions like the on that was carried out about Flow.

It was insulting to force the MV on deWP with pure might and never even apologize for this rude, insulting and destructive behaviour.

It's insulting not to talk to the point, but circumvent the problems.

Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 18:08, 7 September 2017 (UTC)

I meant this as a general advice, because it wouldn't be the first time I see a German Wikipedian banned because of his tone on Phabricator or here, it wasn't that specific.

I have too admit that Sänger is right. That VisualEditor can't handle talk pages isn't that inherent in its concept, but by design: I think it would be entirely possible to check, if I'm on a talk page (ns overridable by magic word) and change ve a bit to make talk page feature more prominent there. (Your signature and indent-related things)

I haven't been getting involved in the VE-on-talkpages issue because I don't use VE much, because I've been trying to deal with bigger issues, and because it's so hard to get the WMF to adjust course. However I fundamentally agree with Sanger and MGChecker.

Deliberately crippling VE is a symptom of a general ideological and strategy error. I sometimes find VE valuable, and it is absurd-bordering-on-malicious that the WMF prohibits me from using VE to edit content. The WMF's error is imagining that content is supposed to be on one page, and discussions on another. A page is a page. Editing content on talk pages is a core workflow, which shows up within almost any other workflow at any time. We also often have discussions on non-talk pages. Any given page should be presumed to contain simultaneous content&discussion. The WMF's efforts to rip the wiki in two are a major source of conflict between the WMF&community.

Questions from a neutral view:

• Why do we want to uninstall Flow? Unless the first board get's created (Trizek said, it won't unless consensus is reached) there is no effect here. But:
• Why was it installed then? I mean the only effect was that the flow user was created, and it created two templates, but for which reason did you setup an extension then which is not that easy to remove again?

Additionally: I read through phab:T63729. The only work there was, because there were already flow boards. At dewiki there was no board created yet, so uninstalling it would not cause any additional workload, than just change two dblists and SWAT it. Non flow-developers can do that as well.

My main problem is lack of trust towards the devs and deciders at WMF. They simply don't seem to get it,that the communities, not them, have the last word in the Wikiverse.

The last times they developed some bigger software stuff, they nearly always failed massively:

• VE first installation against the advice of the community: an epic disaster. Only after they started to listen, it became useful.
• MV, a pet project without real use, massive problems with legal necessities, but pushed massively by some individuals for personal vain, was forced on the communities with brutal abuse of power, and up to now they have not even apologized for this extreme bad and hostile behaviour.
• SuperProtect, something that should have been ditched within the hour and the hostile, anti-community-scheming bad devs should have been kicked out asap, lasted for over a year before it got finally half-heartedly deleted.
• Now the next pet project without real use cases is pushed massively, again with complete disregard for the input from the communities, even deliberately biased "surveys" to make it look better and the deliberate and unreasoned block of the VE from talk pages, just to make Flow look better.

No, why should I trust those people? Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 10:21, 10 September 2017 (UTC)

SuperProtect... anti-community-scheming bad devs

Lighten up on the devs. Paid devs had to do what their boss said. That boss was Eloquence. Eloquence lost his job here. Eloquence was acting with the support of Executive Director Lila. Lila was fired. Lila was acting with the endorsement of the Board of Trustees. The community fired three of those board members, and I think all board members other than Jimbo have been replaced. Almost everyone responsible for Superprotect is gone.

• Why was Flow installed: I'm not WMF, but I'll offer my view. Flow was installed on every wiki because the long term plan was to kill wikitext talk pages and switch all wikis to Flow.
  
  Wikipedia started with several years of exponential growth. Exponential growth always hits a wall. After the peak the editor base declined for a while, then appears to have roughly stabilized. However a bit of panic set in at the WMF during the decline. There was fear that the decline would continue into a crash. Based on some really lousy research they concluded that wikitext was the problem. A theory emerged that vast numbers of "regular" people would think skydiving was a fun hobby writing-an-encyclopedia was a fun hobby, if only they didn't have to deal with wikitext. The WMF initiated a strategy. I quote: "deprecate wiki syntax as the primary input method". The vision was that VisualEditing would be the core platform for editing, and that wikitext talk pages would be replaced with more conventional forum-style software. The lead designer for Flow said he "would dearly love to kill off Wikitext". He told us to seek "Zen acceptance" that Flow would not have proper wikitext support, and that it was the WMF's decision to deploy Flow whether we wanted it or not.
  
  To save the WMF the trouble of repeating themselves: After the anti-Flow shitstorm as well as the Superprotect conflict, the WMF has been giving repeated assurances that they currently have no plans to activate Flow pages without local community consensus. However Flow's proponents still clearly expect Flow will eventually be fully deployed. They have Faith that we will want Flow, if they just keep spending enough money working on it.
  
  
• Why do we want to uninstall Flow: An immediately practical reason is that uninstalling the unused extension improves the security and stability of the wiki. Flow is an exceptionally large, complex, and intrusive extension hooking into many parts of the wiki software. Furthermore the WMF has laid out massive development ideas for Flow, development that would have major entanglements with all parts of the wiki. There have been severe security bugs in the past, and the new work would will inevitably create new security and stability bugs. There is no reason that wikis which aren't using Flow should be subject to those bugs.
  
  However probably the main driving reason for uninstallation is that the overwhelming majority of editors hate Flow and want it gone. Really truly gone. (87% in the Meta RFC.) Most people don't want an "upgraded" version activated in the future, and many have said they don't want the WMF wasting money continuing to develop it. There is a common view that Flow is a dead end, like LiquidTreads. There is a common view that the WMF is going to keep pushing the Flow agenda, even if the WMF isn't currently forcing Flow pages. If the major wikis progressively have Flow uninstalled, the WMF will soon be forced to face reality.

I agree with Alsee, completely seconded.

If you are aware of security issues, please report them.

Flow's developments are not for everyone but only for wikis that have it and use it. Force the communities which don't use Flow now to use it is a waste of time, like uninstalling it. We will not do either.

Flow development is a waste of time, just uninstall it ;)

That's your personal opinion. Not the opinion of communities which use it daily and want improvements to be done. ;)

I do not recall anyone requesting that Flow be uninstalled from communities that want it. Although I do question the WMF spending resources on continued development, given the apparent low interest and long term viability of the project.