Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-8-20190319212423/@comment-5956954-20190325005055

Noreplyz wrote: Yes, it was an experiment, and it depended on what sort of behaviour we saw with chat mostly closed vs always open.

If you experiment on your wiki by removing a set of low quality pages, and you find that it drives higher quality edits on other pages, you'd keep those bad pages deleted. In a similar way, Staff have found that their time in Office Hours were much more successful than past ones, and Staff believe that the benefits of chat being closed at other times outweigh the lack of chat for users to get help or socialise. If only staff office hours weren't during the time I have to prepare for work. Other than that, I got that was the experiment since it was outlined in the main post, and it's good to see productivity increase (though I personally wonder how Staff act informally than just strive to act formally to build more connection).

I still wished there was an earlier announcement than March 19 ("at least until the end of February") when I S:C'd. It would look like Staff's eager to see the results, show them, and let it generate discussion, much like an experiment is meant to do (assuming it's the same as Empirical science). I question, then, why did it take a while to announce this?