Data on usage of StructuredDiscussions (Flow)
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	KStoller-WMF
	Sep 2 2023, 12:02 AM

Description

All data are based on August 2023's data (latest complete month). Observations based on the data contained in the report:

French Wikipedia is by far the largest Flow user. It has twice as many Flow posts than Mediawiki.org (the second largest user). French Wikipedia combined with Mediawiki.org has more Flow edits than all of the other wikis together.
LiquidThreads is nearly unused (it has one or two edits on occassion, zero edits on most other days), DiscussionTools is used in thousands and thousands of edits per day. Flow's usage is in the hundreds area, so significantly less usage than DT, but significantly more than LiquidThreads.
French Wikipedia's Forum_des_nouveaux and Forum_de_relecture is responsible for a significant portion of Flow edits.

As the PM of the team that maintains Flow, I want to better understand the usage of Flow, so that I can decide on how we should proceed with related work:
T342831: Temporary Accounts: Update StructuredDiscussions (Flow)
T332022: [Epic] Undeploying StructuredDiscussions (Flow)

This task is important because the Growth team will need to work on updates to Flow to comply with IP Masking changes:
T342831: Temporary Accounts: Update StructuredDiscussions (Flow)

The Growth team wants to limit engineering time investment in Flow due to the long term plans to drop support of Flow: T332022: [Epic] Undeploying StructuredDiscussions (Flow)

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

Provide some initial data on Flow usage, guided by the above questions.

Status	Assigned	Task
In Progress	Niharika	T324492 Temporary accounts - MVP
Open	None	T326816 Update features for temporary accounts
Open	KStoller-WMF	T326877 [Epic] Update Growth Team-owned products that may be affected by IP Masking
Open	None	T335670 Disable Flow/Structured Discussions from all namespaces, except for user talk pages, on Catalan Wikipedia
Open	None	T106123 Extensions needing to be removed from Wikimedia wikis
Open	None	T332022 [Epic] Undeploying StructuredDiscussions (Flow)
Resolved	Trizek-WMF	T346108 [EPIC] IP Masking: StructuredDiscussions (Flow)/LiquidThreads Community discussion
Resolved	Urbanecm_WMF	T345484 Data on usage of StructuredDiscussions (Flow)

@Trizek-WMF Feel free to add or reword these questions.

KStoller-WMF triaged this task as Medium priority.Sep 2 2023, 12:03 AM

I collected the requested data and published a report at https://people.wikimedia.org/~urbanecm/growth-team/flow_usage_report_20230913.html. All data are based on August 2023's data (latest complete month). Here are my observations based on the data contained in the report:

French Wikipedia is by far the largest Flow user. It has twice as many Flow posts than Mediawiki.org (the second largest user). French Wikipedia combined with Mediawiki.org has more Flow edits than all of the other wikis together.
LiquidThreads is nearly unused (it has one or two edits on occassion, zero edits on most other days), DiscussionTools is used in thousands and thousands of edits per day. Flow's usage is in the hundreds area, so significantly less usage than DT, but significantly more than LiquidThreads.
French Wikipedia's Forum_des_nouveaux and Forum_de_relecture is responsible for a significant portion of Flow edits.

If there are any questions about the report or if there are any follow-up questions that need to be answered with data, feel free to let me know.

Thank you, this is very helpful and should help @Trizek-WMF and me decide how to approach the community discussion (T346108: [EPIC] IP Masking: StructuredDiscussions (Flow)/LiquidThreads Community discussion).