Report: Data on usage of StructuredDiscussions (Flow)

Date: 2023-09-04
Author: Martin Urbanec, WMF (murbanec@wikimedia.org)
License: Apache License

Questions

See T345484: Data on usage of StructuredDiscussions (Flow) for details.

  1. On which wikis is Flow used frequently? (top 5 wikis regarding new topics, and replies)
  2. What is the usage of Flow compared with other discussion tools (DiscussionTools & LiquidThreads)? (Both in general and on wikis where it is actively used.)
  3. What are the 20 most active Flow boards?
  4. If not too difficult to determine: How many Flow comments are made by IP editors as their first edit?

Methodology

For the purposes of this report, "usage of Flow" means making For the purposes of this report, "usage of Flow" means making an edit in the Topic namespace on a particular wiki (such as, adding a new post, contributing to a thread or editing an existing post). Reading a Flow-based discussion, deleting/hiding/suppressing a topic/post, editing a board/thread summary or similar are not counted as Flow usage in this report. For Discussion tools, "usage" means an edit to a talk page that is tagged with DiscussionTools tags.

This decision was made to make numbers easier to compare with non-Flow discussion tools: for example, while those concepts can be emulated in DiscussionTools, there is no native support for hiding or summarizing a thread in DiscussionTools.

All data and counts in this report are based on August 2023 data.

00. Acquire the data

Query the flowdb database and get necessary data around Flow revisions.

Sources:

01. On which wikis is Flow used frequently?

Flow is most frequently used on the following wikis:

02. What is the usage of Flow compared with other discussion tools (DiscussionTools & LiquidThreads)?

(Both in general and on wikis where it is actively used.)

For comparsion between DiscussionTools and LiquidThreads, I use total number of edits made per day.

Flow

DiscussionTools

LiquidThreads

NOTE: LiquidThreads is enabled only on 5 Wikimedia wikis (compared to Flow, which is enabled on 48 wikis and DiscussionTools, which is enabled everywhere). Its usage is low for that reason.

List of LiquidThreads-enabled wikis:

03. What are the 20 most active Flow boards?

The Phabricator task does not make it clear whether "most active Flow boards" is meant across all wikis or on each top-5 wiki separately. This report interprets "most active Flow board" as Flow board on all wikis combined (this means larger wikis are overrepresented, as we're looking on the raw number of usages).

04. How many Flow comments are made by IP editors as their first edit?

Because the data for Flow is recorded in a separate database and not directly available in the data lake, this is not an easy query to make. Excluding from the report per the task.