My 2 agorot in the Flow or not Flow discussion:
A prominent Hebrew Wikipedia user started a discussion about his impression
that too few people participate in the discussions about nominating
featured articles.[1] This Wikipedia has about 700 active and 150 very
active editors[2]; the number of participants in these discussions is
usually much less than twenty, often less than ten.
Now I don't know what are other people's reasons not to participate in
them; maybe a lot of them are just not interested in discussing featured
articles.
I know what my reasons are, though. I am quite interested in such
discussions, and I would participate in them, but I don't, because in the
few times I tried, it filled my watchlist with unnecessary notifications
about other people's opinions. These opinions are relevant, but the way
they are presented in the watchlist is unhelpful and I feel that it wastes
my time.
More structure in such discussions would encourage me to participate.
The current version of Flow doesn't solve this problem: Its notifications
are far from being well-adapted even for simple talk pages, and it doesn't
even attempt to be adapted to a more structured decision-making discussion
like Featured Article nomination. But I do believe that Flow is in the
direction of resolving these problems. Flow will have to be carefully
tweaked for each discussion scenario, but the general idea of having
adaptable structured discussion is a good start.
The frequent argument for remaining with the current talk pages and not
moving to Flow is that the current talk pages work. Well, at least in this
case they don't, and Flow could be a solution to that.
[1] Roughly corresponding to
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:TFAR
[2]
http://stats.wikimedia.org/EN/TablesWikipediaHE.htm
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Amir Elisha Aharoni · אָמִיר אֱלִישָׁע אַהֲרוֹנִי
http://aharoni.wordpress.com
“We're living in pieces,
I want to live in peace.” – T. Moore