That's not a reasonable task, Marc. Newbies have an equally hard time editing content, too, and even when they succeed, on many projects they're very likely to be reverted and deluged with templated messages in response to a good faith attempt. There is no evidentiary basis to demonstrate that new users have a harder time participating in discussion than they do in content contribution. Independent studies seem to identify the nature of the discussions as being significantly more problematic than the technical means of participating.
Nobody is saying that it is easy for newbies to participate on many of the larger Wikimedia projects. There are lots of ways that we can make it easier. The most obvious one is automatic signing of comments, and it is something that we have technically been able to impose for years; sinebot didn't come into existence in a vacuum.
Risker/Anne
On 8 September 2014 09:58, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 09/08/2014 12:46 AM, John Mark Vandenberg wrote:
While it may not be everybody's dream system, talk pages are quite usable, as demonstrated by a lot of people using them every single day.
That's... not a demonstration of usability. Like many people, I found myself using some random blunt object not designed for purpose to hammer in a nail at least once; that speaks to the importance of getting the nail in, not the lack of need for a proper hammer. :-)
Let's be honest here; I'm /highly/ computer-literate, and I've been using Mediawiki for some 11 years and I *still* find talk pages an annoyance at the best of times and they can be downright painful if there's anything like a large discussion in progress you are attempting to track/participate in. Between edit conflicts, increasingly confusing indentation, signatures that may or may not make separation between commenters clear... It's no surprise that newbies are scared away. Editing articles is already hard enough, anything that provides an extra barrier to participation hurts - especially when that barrier lies in the way of getting /help/.
Talk pages, as a mechanism, are lacking every affordance that users expect of a communication medium. And no, that X thousand people have gotten used to their failings does not make them any better for the Y billion people that have not.
But don't take my word for it! Find random newbies, and ask them to try the simple task of commenting on a discussion in progress without giving them guidance. They they flail around, or simply give up, remember that it's not /them/ who have failed -- I'm pretty sure they've participated in plenty of other online discussions before.
-- Marc
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