Well, I think that the "article editing" project (i.e., VE) has a huge potential for also resolving a lot of discussion space issues. I don't see tacking on yet another UI as being a positive for new editor introduction or retention, and cannot think of another significant site that has two such wildly divergent interfaces (one very flexible and the other very rigid in structure), except perhaps in the mobile vs. desktop situation.
I dunno, Marc. There are different expectations about signature, depending on the target group. We still have people being freaked out that article histories contain their username or IP (a form of automatic signature), so I'm not convinced that there's an expectation on the part of new users that anything they write anywhere will automatically be signed.
Risker/Anne
On 8 September 2014 10:24, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 09/08/2014 10:18 AM, Risker wrote:
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.
I suppose that's a philosophical divergence between us then - that sinebot even needs to exist to me is demonstration that the system is broken.
You say that discussion isn't all that much harder than editing content. Even if I agreed with that (and I do not, edit conflicts in articles are much rarer than on talk pages - and usually easier to sort out), that's not a *good* thing!
Participating in discussion should be much, *much* easier than editing articles: encouraging newbies to seek help and participate in the community *before* diving in anything but trivial article edits would be an immensely powerful retention tool!
(Which isn't to say that editing articles doesn't *also* need a lot of help - but that's a different project).
-- Marc
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