The Wikimedia Foundation collaboration team announced this week, both on Wikipedia and on the WikiTech-l mailing list, that Flow will no longer be under active development.

This news will come as a bombshell for the experienced Wikimedians who have been watching the development cycle of this project. The chaotic and disorganized nature of talk page discussions on the English Wikipedia have long concerned Wikimedians and Foundation staff alike—in a Signpost editorial published just under two months ago I wrote:

Flow has been a controversial endeavor by the Foundation to thoroughly rework talk page mechanics and formatting. Its roots lay in the earlier LiquidThreads, a technical effort by WMF developers that eventually fell flat through a combination of poor technical implementation and poor community reception. At the risk of raising the eyebrows of some of our readers, the best write-up of how LiquidThreads came and went and what its relationship to Flow has been comes from Wikipediocracy: "The dream that died: Erik Möller and the WMF’s decade-long struggle for the perfect discussion system".

According to (Fuzheado), the Flow team gave an upbeat presentation on Flow's development status (video) at Wikimania just six weeks ago (though there was "hard questioning by the audience about whether the community would accept it"). Reactions are a mix of frustration that yet another effort to fix such an entrenched problem has failed and of relief that the controversial project—in the eyes of many, one of the surviving technical white elephants of the pre-Lila Tretikov era—is now apparently finito.

Flow isn't actually officially dead, according to the careful wording of the announcement. Rather, it is now out of active development pending "changes in that long-term plan". What is sidelining it now is that "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." As one user pointed out:

The rest of the announcement clarifies the situation:

In the opinions of some Wikimedians, the root problem of the Wikimedia projects isn't individual problems like talk pages or templates, but rather the technical debt of a decade and a half of disorganized organic growth; the Foundation's first round of attempts at comprehensive technical improvements fell flat not because they were poorly thought out per se, but because they failed to take into account the extraordinary complexity of the use cases to which Wikimedians have adopted wikicode. SUL finalization is now complete, but plenty of other core improvements, like interwiki transclusion (to centralize template complexity) and further development of Echo notifications (to unify notification streams), remain to complete. Such core improvements may eventually make more ambitious projects like Flow manageable.

In March, the WMF kicked off strategic planning consultation with the Wikimedia community. The first strategic plan was the Foundation's Goliath growth projection project, begun in 2009 and published in 2011 (Signpost coverage here, here, and elsewhere), yet it ultimately proved flat-footed at best. The Foundation began this process of self-definition anew this year (as part of a general shift towards an increasing focus on impact and impact metrics), starting with a large-scale community consultation. As we reported at the time, the WMF is trying to make the document into "what will become a discipline of ongoing strategic inquiry, assessment, and alignment. This more agile, adaptable process will directly inform and update our priorities and goals and help us maintain a strategic direction that is consistent with the Wikimedia vision, supports the Wikimedia projects, and is sensitive to the changing global environment."

The Foundation has finished digesting the outcomes of the consultation, and chief operating officer Terence Gilbey has published a blog post highlighting the findings. Part of this month's metrics meeting was dedicated to these findings, and a full deck of slides—119 pages of them—is is available on Commons.

The consultation was organized around two questions:

Gilbey highlights the following findings:

• Mobile and app: Mobile-related comments reveal an opportunity to improve our existing mobile offerings for both editors and readers and raise awareness about our native apps. Participants (mostly anonymous users) urged us to “make an app,” when one is already available for iOS and Android devices. We also saw comments that stressed the importance of mobile editing, formatting for smaller (mobile) screen sizes, article summaries for different usage patterns, and the value of “going mobile.”[3]

• Editing and collaboration: In this category, we find requests to make editing simpler, ideas for enhancing collaboration among editors, suggestions for editing tools, and proposals to build editor rating and qualification programs. This is one of the few categories in which logged-in comments, at 56%, outnumber comments from anonymous and new users. This category provides valuable insight for improvements in editor support including Wikipedia’s visual editor and future projects in the newly created Community tech team, as well as potential new editor support initiatives.

• Rich content: Participants requested more rich content on Wikimedia sites, suggesting more video, audio, and images. 80% of these comments were submitted by anonymous and new users. One US-based participant commented: “is there any major website in the world with less video?”

• Volunteer community: We saw a particular interest in improving “community climate” in this category, with a focus on interpersonal dynamics and culture. Participants identified a need to increase diversity (in particular, gender diversity), improve processes and workflows, and address bureaucracy-related challenges. This is another category in which logged-in comments, at 54%, outnumber comments provided by anonymous and new users.

• Wikimedia Foundation feedback: This category focused on the relationship between the Wikimedia Foundation and the volunteer community and includes suggestions of how the Foundation might change its practices and priorities to align with the volunteer community. These comments are from mostly logged-in users (88%), most of them highly experienced users with an average edit count of more than 64,000 edits. Suggestions included providing better support to editors in a variety of ways and continuing to ask for feedback from core community members.

• Content quality (accuracy): These comments emphasized the importance of content accuracy, trustworthiness, and reliability. Comments focused on citation quality, the use of expert editors, and even restricting editing (so that “not everyone can edit”). Most (73%) of comments in this category were from anonymous and new users, signaling an opportunity to communicate to readers about the accuracy and trustworthiness of the content within Wikipedia and sister projects.

• Education and universities: These comments reflected both a concern about the perception of Wikipedia as a (non)credible source for academic inquiry, and also recognition of the growing opportunity for Wikimedia to extend its content, brand, and global presence into online education by developing courses, curricula, and partnering with other online educational resources. 76% of the comments in this category came from anonymous and new users, whereas only 24% originated from logged-in users.

• Translation and languages: We saw a collective interest in this category from logged-in, anonymous, and new users. Key suggestions included a focus increasing translation capabilities and tool, expanding into more languages, and developing the ability to easily translate across projects. These comments validate the need for the Content Translation tool, which is now available on 224 language-versions of Wikipedia as a beta feature.

In related news, the Foundation is now engaging in what it calls a community capacity development project. According to an an email to the mailing list posted by the WMF's senior program officer, emerging Wikimedia communities Asaf Bartov, the Foundation is allocating staff time to "deliberate capacity-development projects with interested communities in six capacity areas: community governance; conflict management; on-wiki technical skills; new contributor engagement and growth; partnerships; [and] communications". "Community capacity" is defined as "the ability of a community to achieve ... very diverse [goals that] span issues that affect one or all Wikimedia communities." It is, in effect, a trial of a more hands-on approach on the part of the Wikimedia Foundation in recruiting ideas from the community, following along the lines of earlier breakout efforts, most prominently this year's "Inspire" campaign.