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. 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/
*Jared Zimmerman * \ Director of User Experience \ Wikimedia Foundation
M : +1 415 609 4043 | : @JaredZimmermanhttps://twitter.com/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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