On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 8:28 PM, Jared Zimmerman <
jared.zimmerman(a)wikimedia.org> wrote:
Martjin, its a good thing to ask "does
participation on a talk page
increase, decrease, or have no effect on participation in the main article
space"
but it does presuppose that there is greater value in participating on the
article main space doesn't it?
Yes, and I stand by that point.
As someone who cares about supporting healthy online
communities I want to
make sure that all good faith ways of contributing are seen as equally
valid, useful, and helpful to the project and community.
This claim in itself is rather troublesome. I assume you mean a less
extreme version of this; I'm sure you're not claiming that a good faith
contribution of a new article of the new game a bunch of friends invented
in class is equally valid, useful and helpful as writing a featured article
(something I have never been able to do, and am painfully aware of). What
exactly it is you are claiming I'm not sure of, so it's hard to agree or
disagree.
That's an interesting read. But how I read that article, it's that
according to this (by its creator abandoned) theory, newcomers in a
community learn to become 'full' community members (this seems to
contradict your earlier statement that all good faith contributions are
equally valuable) by doing small things that are valuable to the community,
even if they are small and low-risk. That doesn't support of equally
validity, usefulness and helpfulness even if we would agree that making
talk page edits are actually valuable to the community, which we don't. (I
would assert that it's neutral to the community, but bad with regards to
newcomer engagement and newcomer education). But it's definitely
interesting, thank you for pointing me to it, I'll use it as a jumping
board for further reading.
If my reading of that article is wrong, i strongly encourage you to go in
and fix it (or, if you fancy the n = 1 experiment, leave a note on the talk
page with a new account, and see what happens)
--Martijn
*Jared Zimmerman * \\ Director of User Experience \\ Wikimedia
Foundation
M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmerman<https://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman>
On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 10:52 AM, Martijn Hoekstra <
martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On Friday, May 23, 2014, Jared Zimmerman <jared.zimmerman(a)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<https://twitter.com/JaredZimmerman>
On Fri, May 23, 2014 at 9:24 AM, Martijn Hoekstra <
martijnhoekstra(a)gmail.com> wrote:
On May 23, 2014 1:44 PM, "Jon Robson" <jrobson(a)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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