Thread:Talk:Flow/Some feedback/reply

You've got to be kidding, right? "Talkback templates do the job just fine." No, they don't. They're garish and dumb, and you have to remember to clear them out manually or leave them cluttering your talk page. (By "dumb", I mean they're kludgy; they're a hacker's solution to a software problem.)

Everything else you mention resolves to "users will pick it up eventually". Sure, a lot do -- you and I are evidence of that. But how many give up in frustration before figuring it out? That's what we don't know. There are so many people with the knowledge and desire to help WMF projects, but they get intimidated by overly-complicated technical obstacles, of which there are many... and user-to-user communication is one of them.

"The biggest problem with editor retention is not the difficulty of the interface, it is policy and the bureaucracy of WP that make it so unwelcoming. The steepest learning curve are all the rules, not the UI."

You're only saying that because you picked up the UI easily. Not everyone is as adept as you or I. Besides, there's nothing WMF can do about rules; that's up to the individual editing communities.