Board Thread:General Discussion/@comment-8-20190319212423/@comment-5811199-20190323132918

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.