On 20 March 2015 at 06:13, Tilman Bayer tbayer@wikimedia.org wrote:
On Friday, March 20, 2015, Tilman Bayer <tbayer@wikimedia.org javascript:_e(%7B%7D,'cvml','tbayer@wikimedia.org');> wrote:
Just to throw this in here as one data point: "39% of talk page threads contain wrong indentations <
https://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Research:Newsletter/2014/November#39.25_of_t...
"
PS: The result from that paper was actually even worse than that (somewhat sloppy) headline suggests: the researchers "found that 29 of 74 total turns, or 39%±14pp of an average thread, had indentation that misidentified the turn to which they were a reply."
I'm not sure you really read the underlying study, Tilman; the sample size is so absurdly small that there is no way it is statistically signifant. (550 discussions on 83 article talk pages, in case anyone was wondering; the equivalent of about 10 minutes' worth of discussions on enwiki, except that they are looking at talk pages that may have conversations dating back 10+ years.) And the purpose of the study was to see if this particular manner of analysing a discussion ("lexical pairs") was useful in identifying who said what to whom; it's a discussion of the analysis process, not the actual discussions.
Nonetheless, if you were trying to illustrate that there are communication benefits in having an easily read flow of discussion, I don't think anyone is disagreeing with you about that, and simplification of the indentation system/process would be desirable no matter what underlying software is used for discussion. What is being said in this thread is that Flow does not do this now, and in fact is currently designed to prevent this from happening.
Risker/Anne