On May 23, 2014 1:44 PM, "Jon Robson" <jrobson@wikimedia.org> wrote:
>
>  snip...
>
> It's hard to measure the impact of the talk bubble when it is
> displayed like this. I'd be interested to do some sort of A/B test
> around it to see whether more people visit the talk page when the
> number is shown - I'm not sure if Growth has any plans to do this.

I think the following is controversial, but I hope not: talk pages are anti wiki in nature, and more of a necessary evil if disagreements can't be solved through collaborative editing than something we should promote the visibility of. They are a last resort, and I would be perfectly happy if a newcomer never knew they existed for a long while.

I would be very reluctant about any change that might cause a newcomer to edit a talk page and suggest a change (that probably nobody will read, and if they do probably won't respond to) than just edit the page.

If any A/B testing is done, any marginal loss of mainspace edits, for any number of extra talk page views or edits, should imo be counted as a regression.

Too rambling; u wot m8?
Before setting up A/B tests, please consider and discuss success conditions. They nay be unintuitive.

--Martijn

> Also I wonder if this is something Flow is thinking about.
>
> Either way can we make a decision and either kill this code, or bring
> it into beta mode?
>
> [1] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/San_Francisco?mobileaction=alpha
> [2] https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Tofu?mobileaction=alpha
>
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