MZMcBride <z <at> mzmcbride.com> writes: > > Forwarding this to wikimedia-l as it doesn't seem to be very technical in > nature, but definitely seems worthy of discussion. > > MZMcBride > > Danny Horn wrote: > >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. > > > >To better address the needs of our core contributors, we're now focusing > >our strategy on the curation, collaboration, and admin processes that take > >place on a variety of pages. Many of these processes use complex > >workarounds -- templates, categories, transclusions, and lots of > >instructions -- that turn blank wikitext talk pages into structured > >workflows. There are gadgets and user scripts on the larger wikis to help > >with some of these workflows, but these tools aren't standardized or > >universally available. > >
Nearly every ambitious project starts with huge promises and fizzles out with a "change in focus". What's the underlying issue here? How can we get a product to a point where it's deployed and usable? I know there's a problem with scope creep for Wikimedia projects (due to design by committee), but that alone can't be the reason. I know no one wants to admit failure, but when WMF says something is in maintenance mode they really mean they're killing the project. Can there be a postmortem for this, so that we can at least learn something from the failure? - Ryan _______________________________________________ Wikimedia-l mailing list, guidelines at: https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Mailing_lists/Guidelines Wikimedia-l@lists.wikimedia.org Unsubscribe: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikimedia-l, <mailto:wikimedia-l-requ...@lists.wikimedia.org?subject=unsubscribe>
