Wikimedia Blog/Drafts/Flow is the future. Come help.

Flow is the future. Come help.

Flow is the Wikimedia Foundation's planned discussion and workflow engine. It is the collaboration system of the future and we think it will radically improve the experience of our volunteer editors.

When comments and discussion first appeared on the Internet, we all thought we'd see the brilliant minds of our generation discussing the issues of the day in a thoughtful, courteous fashion. Instead, what we got was a lot of: “FIRST POST!” “Jake sucks," "Kylla rulez”, and "aliens caused climate change!!!" Remember the amazing potential that fizzled?

The Internet world dealt with this problem in various ways: by locking down poster permissions, paying staff to moderate content, or even turning comments off entirely. Many of the online discussions we see today are meticulously curated; a great deal of software, man-hours, and money are spent to solve the problematic signal-to-noise ratio. Wikipedia is different. We didn't create the world's largest encyclopedia by paying moderators to police content – the encyclopedia grows every year because anyone can contribute, and the quality of its content is maintained through peer-to-peer discussion and collaboration. We believe in empowering more users to participate in discussions, and in giving them tools to keep those discussions productive and healthy.

Discussions are the backbone of all Wikimedia projects. Whether it's deciding if a reference is reliable, settling on spelling and punctuation conventions, or choosing an Article of the Day, our community makes countless decisions each day simply by talking to each other. Unfortunately, the current system of using freeform wiki talk pages to communicate is opaque and confusing to new users. It is a wall that prevents potential volunteers from participating in the collaboration process. Crafting a modern, usable discussion system will help eliminate this barrier for new users. Flow will also alleviate the frustration and workload of our experienced users. By turning a system that is fragile, easily broken, and needlessly complex into one that minimizes user error and confusion, we hope to reduce the amount of volunteer time spent tidying up mistakes made by well-intentioned newer users.

Imagine a world in which the software helps prevent people from making mistakes; where you don't have to read a manual to nominate an article for deletion; and where users can spend more time focused on the content than cleaning up messes caused by broken tools.

Building Flow will be no simple task. Wikimedia boasts over 800 wikis in close to 300 languages, each with their own autonomy and processes. We cannot possibly model the thousands of workflows that exist within these communities ourselves, nor should we. In addition to a discussion system, Flow will include a "workflow description language," a lightweight system that allows wikis to describe and create their own workflows. Our goal is to empower more users to participate not just in creating and discussing content, but in shaping the processes that ensure good-faith collaboration in every Wikimedia project, large and small.

Help us

We need help to build this — and not just help writing code. We need help from veteran editors and newbies alike. We have a community that has formed over the past decade that is incredibly passionate about the projects, and they have deep knowledge about how their discussions work. We want to hear from them. We want to hear about the difficulties that our new users are having as well, so that we can make the projects work better. Let your voice be heard.

Join us

If you are a developer and are interesting in joining our team, we are looking to hire a Software Engineer to work on Flow. Apply now at jobs.wikimedia.org.