Wil Sinclair wrote:
Flow needs a deep and broad community consensus
to what would probably amount to the biggest single
change in the history of the project for the day-to-day
collaboration amongst editors that is so vital to our success.
Wouldn't it be easier to achieve such consensus if there was any
actual evidence that Flow or any other improvement on talk pages would
improve editor engagement? There is an existence proof that tens of
millions of editors have created nearly ten million articles amounting
to dozens of gigabytes of text using talk pages as they have existed
since 2003. Why haven't the Foundation's major engineering changes
ever been made contingent on the existence of conclusive empirical
data about improvements for those editors?
Where are the usability studies to determine whether Flow makes things
easier or more efficient for editors? Are any planned?
Foundation strategy increasingly seems to me like Craigslist if it had
been infiltrated by hundreds of engineers adding add real-time ad
listing updates, black backgrounds for pictures, WYSIWYG ad editing,
and replacing hypertext function links with minimalist icons. Someone
should sneak up on Craig Newmark and make a video recording of his
reaction to suggesting WYSIWYG editing, and play his reaction to
Foundation leadership staff every morning at the start of their work
day.