My 2 agorot in the Flow or not Flow discussion:
A prominent Hebrew Wikipedia user started a discussion about his impression that too few people participate in the discussions about nominating featured articles.[1] This Wikipedia has about 700 active and 150 very active editors[2]; the number of participants in these discussions is usually much less than twenty, often less than ten.
Now I don't know what are other people's reasons not to participate in them; maybe a lot of them are just not interested in discussing featured articles.
I know what my reasons are, though. I am quite interested in such discussions, and I would participate in them, but I don't, because in the few times I tried, it filled my watchlist with unnecessary notifications about other people's opinions. These opinions are relevant, but the way they are presented in the watchlist is unhelpful and I feel that it wastes my time.
More structure in such discussions would encourage me to participate.
The current version of Flow doesn't solve this problem: Its notifications are far from being well-adapted even for simple talk pages, and it doesn't even attempt to be adapted to a more structured decision-making discussion like Featured Article nomination. But I do believe that Flow is in the direction of resolving these problems. Flow will have to be carefully tweaked for each discussion scenario, but the general idea of having adaptable structured discussion is a good start.
The frequent argument for remaining with the current talk pages and not moving to Flow is that the current talk pages work. Well, at least in this case they don't, and Flow could be a solution to that.
[1] Roughly corresponding to https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TFAR [2] http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaHE.htm
-- Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי http://aharoni.wordpress.com “We're living in pieces, I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore