Responding to two comments. Firstly Risker " 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."
I would go further, reverting newbie edits to talk pages is rare. They may occasionally
need help with indentation or signing, and if they edit a busy page they may get edit
conflicts. But unlike in main space actual reversion is rare. We do need some system to
identify newbie queries that have been left longest, as queries on article talk pages can
linger for a very long time. But we should not treat the need for improvements on talk
pages as being as pressing as the need to improve the experience for newbies in main
space. V/E will help a little there, though not till it is ready to be deployed. But there
are bigger problems, the amount of edit conflicts suffered by the creators of new articles
and the ongoing train wreck with some of the regulars working to the unwritten rule that
everything must be verified, while the system doesn't even prompt newbies to add a
source.
Re Erik's comment "I'm open to us putting some short term effort into talk
> page improvements that can be made without Flow -- knowing it's still
> some time out."
That would be great, there are various Won't fix bugs on Bugzilla that should be easy
to fix. Setting : # and * as paragraph delimiters as far as edit conflicts are concerned
should resolve a lot of the edit conflicts in talk space. Really low hanging fruit.
Regards
Jonathan Cardy