User blog comment:BertH/New Forums now available in Labs/@comment-188432-20121205060437/@comment-188432-20121206200024

Danny, I'm not trying to calculate success rates of something brand new. I'm saying exactly what you're saying: the more articles there are on the wiki, the smaller the percentage of articles that generate discussion. Thus the "there's-no-discussion-here" message appears on an increasing number of pages, with a correspondingly smaller chance that anyone will take up that "call to arms".

To me, the math heavily suggests there's no real point in having the no-discussion message. Why not just let the Related Discussions module elegantly appear when there actually *is* some kind of discussion going on?

Because of the highlight feature, every registered user will know that there is a forum. That's the true call to action. The no-discussion message adds about 100px of vertical height to a page only to redundantly alert people to the existence of the forum.