That's not a reasonable task, Marc. 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. Independent studies seem to identify the nature of
the discussions as being significantly more problematic than the technical
means of participating.
Nobody is saying that it is easy for newbies to participate on many of the
larger Wikimedia projects. There are lots of ways that we can make it
easier. 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.
Risker/Anne
On 8 September 2014 09:58, Marc A. Pelletier <marc(a)uberbox.org> wrote:
On 09/08/2014 12:46 AM, John Mark Vandenberg wrote:
While it may not be everybody's dream system,
talk pages are quite
usable, as demonstrated by a lot of people using them every single
day.
That's... not a demonstration of usability. Like many people, I found
myself using some random blunt object not designed for purpose to hammer
in a nail at least once; that speaks to the importance of getting the
nail in, not the lack of need for a proper hammer. :-)
Let's be honest here; I'm /highly/ computer-literate, and I've been
using Mediawiki for some 11 years and I *still* find talk pages an
annoyance at the best of times and they can be downright painful if
there's anything like a large discussion in progress you are attempting
to track/participate in. Between edit conflicts, increasingly confusing
indentation, signatures that may or may not make separation between
commenters clear... It's no surprise that newbies are scared away.
Editing articles is already hard enough, anything that provides an extra
barrier to participation hurts - especially when that barrier lies in
the way of getting /help/.
Talk pages, as a mechanism, are lacking every affordance that users
expect of a communication medium. And no, that X thousand people have
gotten used to their failings does not make them any better for the Y
billion people that have not.
But don't take my word for it! Find random newbies, and ask them to try
the simple task of commenting on a discussion in progress without giving
them guidance. They they flail around, or simply give up, remember that
it's not /them/ who have failed -- I'm pretty sure they've participated
in plenty of other online discussions before.
-- Marc
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