On Friday, May 23, 2014, Jared Zimmerman <jared.zimmerman@wikimedia.org> wrote:
I'd have to disagree, I think talk pages are where consensus building happens, and while users don't have to discover discussions to be able to participate, i don't see it as a negative thing at all.

It's a fine thing to disagree about. My view on the matter is possibly old fashioned, and while editing as the main consensus building tools with talk pages as a last resort for when that process breaks down is still the principle held by the "be bold" and "consensus" guidelines on the English Wikipedia, I don't know how widely held it still is. Still I feel strongly about it, and believe it is the single most important aspect of the success of wikis.
 
I think the current talk pages are user hostile (the UI, syntax conventions, etc. not the people [usually]) but I think Flow will help that. In testing (~20 rounds ) a common refrain from users has been "Wikipedia has discussions?!" many were totally unaware and thought discussions were a new feature we were testing with them, not the winter prototype http://unicorn.wmflabs.org/winter/

 I don't disbelieve it, but I don't really see it as something interesting new users should be aware of, and mildly harmful if they are led to think Wikipedia is built through up front discussion rather than bold editing and resorting to discussion only when the be bold model breaks down. Promoting harmful misconceptions about the wiki model of editing is not a good idea.

The important thing to measure though is not our respective opinions on the matter, because in the grand scheme of things, they don't matter. The thing to measure is does it encourage newcomers to edit main space more, whether that's right now, or after 20 talk page edits, or does it cause them to edit main space less?

--Martijn



Jared Zimmerman  \\  Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia Foundation               
M : +1 415 609 4043 |   :  @JaredZimmerman



On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 9:24 AM, Martijn Hoekstra <martijnhoekstra@gmail.com> wrote:


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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> Design mailing list
> Design@lists.wikimedia.org
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