On 27 Mar 2015 7:44 am, "bawolff" <bawolff+wn@gmail.com> wrote:
>
> On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 11:09 AM, Jon Robson <jdlrobson@gmail.com> wrote:
> >
> > On 27 Mar 2015 2:11 am, "Quim Gil" <qgil@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >>
> >>
> >>
> >> On Fri, Mar 27, 2015 at 1:07 AM, Moushira Elamrawy
> >> <melamrawy@wikimedia.org> wrote:
> >>>
> >>> > The banner itself is currently driving traffic to the userpage (which
> >>> > itself needs further iteration)
> >>
> >>
> >> I think offering a link to the history of the page is better.
> > We already do.
> >>The last editor is not that relevant (and quite often it will be a bot),
> >
> > Yet more people click on it for whatever reason:
> > http://mobile-reportcard.wmflabs.org/#other-graphs-tab.
>
> I don't think people realize that the date links to the history. I
> certainly didn't until someone told me.
>
> In some ways that makes sense - users (I'm assuming) want to know who
> is writing this stuff, so they click on the name, as that's a person.
> But that presents skewed information where really they would be better
> served by the history page (Maybe anyways. That's making a lot of
> assumptions about user intentions which could be wrong).
>
Sure. this is definitely one interpretation and you are probably right but I'm saying we should test and validate that hypothesis... Otherwise we are just making guesses (albeit good ones).

> >
> > More generally we really need to pay attention to our data and rely on it
> > more. I see far too many changes across the site based on guesswork and
> > personal preferences and that's an anti pattern we need to reverse. Now we
> > have a ux research team and ways to a/b test we can test different designs
> > and see if they generate the correct behaviour. In this case I hope we will
> > test to see if last modified at the top is driving more edits than putting
> > it at the bottom.
>
> Is the goal of the last modified header to drive edits? Sure it
> implies that people like "me" can edit but it seems more like it would
> communicate to the reader the nature of the page they are reading as
> opposed to encourage them to actually edit.

From my understanding the idea was to help people realise that wikipedia is edited by volunteers (and thus make people at least aware they can edit. It still shocks me in 2015 that I have conversations with people who don't know they can edit). My point here is we should think about why we are doing things and what we are trying to achieve. I hear too many times: "I don't like this! This is ugly!" But when this doesn't have any qualitative reasoning this is pretty useless to the movement and seems to zap everyone's energy.

I kicked off this thread just to bring up the point that this thread has confirmed which is many people are going to have different opinions around moving this bar (just like any design changes) and we need to make sure if we do make this change we can explain them and explain why it was the right thing to do. I'm confident the design team is thinking about these things.