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.