Flow

Flow provides features that are present on most modern websites, but which are not possible to implement in wikitext. The main documentation for Flow, with links to resources and status updates, is located at . FlowはMediaWikiソフトウェアのトークページ（ノートページ）を改善するものとして計画されています。ほぼすべてのモダンなウェブサイトで採用する拡張機能で、ウィキテキストでは実現できないものを提供します。中心となる説明文書は MediaWiki.org上のFlowのページにあり、リソースのリンクと進捗報告などが掲載されています。

Note that Flow is not LiquidThreads, which is a similar forum-system used at some Wikimedia Foundation websites, which is also no longer under active development.

概念上の到達目標

At the time that Flow was conceived, the Wikimedia Foundation believed that:

現代的で直感的な議論のユーザーインターフェイスを利用者は期待していますし、また享受すべきです。

トークページ（ノートページ）は議論の道具として時代遅れであり利用者に優しくありません。経験をつんだ編集者も、返答の仕方がわからない人や署名のやり方などを教える必要がある人の相手をするのに貴重な時間を費やしてしまいます。

利用者はコミュニティの文化的規範に驚かされるべきではありません。

トークページ（ノートページ）に付随して発達した文化（"talkback"テンプレートの存在や他の人のコメントが編集できることなど）の多くは混乱の元であり非効率です。

利用者同士の議論システムが現代的になればプロジェクト群が改善されると私たちは信じています。

共同作業をやりやすくする手段があれば、共同作業が改善され、よい編集者がより生産的になれます。

認識されている問題点

ウィキメディア財団は編集者がどのように利用者トークページ（会話ページ）を使うかを調査してきました。データはオンラインに公開されています。利用者の期待と古いシステムのあいだの齟齬として主なものは下記のとおりです。

議論システムへの利用者の期待と現実の比較

期待	現実
異なる話題を容易に識別できる	会話の階層が底なしに深くなる
コメントを誰が書いたかは明白であり「署名」は自動的にされる	コメントを誰が書いたかを発言の最後に手動で追加する (慣例として)
「返信」ボタン	一貫性がない返信システム (会話を誰の会話ページで保持すべきか?)
シンプルなコメント欄	ウィキテキストやコード
すべての議論について返信があれば通知される	自分の会話ページでの議論についてのみ通知される

計画されている機能

Comparison of wikitext and Flow user-talk discussion systems

What you do now	What you will do then
Leave a message at someone's user talk page	Leave a message at someone's user board
Watch a person's talk page	Subscribe to the person's board
Wonder whether the other editor will reply on your talk page or theirs	Any reply will automatically appear in your feed
Keep checking the person's talk page for a reply	Any reply will automatically, immediately appear in your feed
Reply by clicking [Edit]	Reply by clicking a "Reply" button
Indent the conversation by typing a series of colons	Do nothing: replies are automatically indented
Sign your comment by typing ~~~~	Do nothing: your comments are always signed automatically
Leave {{talkback}} messages so the other user can find your reply	Do nothing: your reply will automatically appear in the other user's feed
Search for new messages on your talk page using page history and diffs	Have all new messages automatically appear on your feed, no matter where the original comment was on the page
Watch the whole user talk page, even though you only care about one conversation	Watch just the one conversation, if that's what you want
Edit your comment by clicking [Edit]	Edit your comment by clicking an edit button

Flow features:

• No edit conflicts, except when trying to edit someone else's comment.
• No {{unsigned}} posts in discussions—all posts and comments will be automatically signed and dated.
• No need to tell new users how to sign their posts or how to indent their comments.
• No need to archive discussions—old posts will automatically "fall off" the page, and can be retrieved by scrolling down.
• No way for inexperienced people to accidentally remove your posts or vandalize them.
• A place for an 'introduction' to the page, which can contain free-form text, user boxes, templates, etc.
• A way to close or hat old threads to prevent further replies.
• A way to link to previous discussions or individual comments.

背景

Flow activity process

Flow was intended to be rethinking of how we do collaborative work in the projects rather than a mere discussion system. Flow hoped to include:

• The Feed module. This is a powerful way for users to have insight into their discussions and interests, and introduces several modern software conveniences (such as subscriptions and tagging)
• The User Discussion module. We are starting our focus only on what we call "User to user discussion" as these discussion types are not overly complex. As we learn more, we can expand the technology to cover additional cases
• A Workflow Description Language module. This will allow local wikis to create both simple and complex software workflows that work with in Flow. Example workflow ideas include:
  • A Block Module. This is an example of a specific user-discussion use case that is best solved in software.
  • A Welcome Module. This is an example of a specific use case that is best served in software rather than templates (think: welcome templates that are interactive and teach new users how to edit before they make mistakes).

Other less concrete ideas included:

• A Watchlist module
• A WikiProjects module
• Further Discussion modules to cover additional use cases (like !voting, noticeboards, the Teahouse, reference desks, article discussions, and so forth)

In the end, none of the modules other than "Feed" (via Echo notifications) and "User discussion" were ever built.

顕著な使用の事例

The primary problems that Flow's user-to-user discussion system attempted to solve are:

Ease of use

The User talk system of responding in Wikitext is user-hostile.

Fragmented discussions

It is difficult to determine where a discussion is to take place.

Determining what's new

There is no easy way to see what has changed in a discussion without resorting to complex, power-user behaviors (such as viewing the diff between the current revision and the last viewed revision).

Contextual interest

Users are required to watch all discussion topics, not just the ones they are involved in.

使いやすさ

Using wikitext as a discussion system was seen as antiquated, opaque, and frankly embarrassing in its difficulty. New users are often scared away by viewing talk pages. They are often afraid of "breaking" them and, once inside the code, don't have a clue about how to respond. There isn't a reply button. How do you indicate that you are replying to someone in particular? What are all these curly braces?

There are no other discussion systems in the world that require users to sign their own posts.

Even reading talk pages is problematic. Users can quickly get lost within deeply threaded discussions. Think about every other kind of conversation you get involved in—in person, via physical letters, via email, via forum software, chat systems, blog comments—you always know who is speaking before you read (or hear) the words. Always. Only in talk pages do you not know who is talking until after the fact.

断片化された議論

When you leave a message on my talk pages, do I respond to you on my talk or yours? What happens if I do? How do you get notified if there are responses on my page? When I leave a message for you on your talk page and you respond to it, how am I alerted to this?

For many power users, using the watchlist to track conversations is useless. Some talk pages have such high activity that hundreds of responses to non-relevant topics are created per day. Some users will page back through their contributions to find changes (which is again a power user ploy and still doesn't display if there has been new activity).

何が変更されたか決める

Watchlists can tell us if there has been a change to a page, but determining what's changed requires a peek into the history. The typical way that one reads discussion pages on MediaWiki is by selecting different revisions and reading the diff. That is, frankly, crazy.

新しい変更はぱっと見で判別できなければだめです。会話の流れに遅れないようにと「マジック (プログラムBlack Magic)」 (別名ブラックマジック/ディープマジック) 他 Trickery に頼るべきではありません。というわけで、修正しましょう。

文脈上の興味

誰かのトークページに新しいメッセージを投稿するとき、私は本当に「そのメッセージ」にしか興味がありません。そのページでほかに何十もの話題があったとしても関係ないのです。ところが、私が出した話題に対する返事をウォッチしようとすると、すべての人の返事を読むことになります。一部のトークページでは書き込みが大量で、私がそのページを再訪して読もうとしても、私の話題も（未読の回答も）とっくにアーカイブされた後かもしれません！