On 23 Jul 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:
Alright, that's a killer argument against them.
Gone are the lines.
Hurray! :)
Maybe we can just agree to phase out unnecessary
formatting -- lots of
articles use bold for headlines, <font...> for table headers etc. This
confuses the "edit section" feature, which (correctly) is not triggered
on these instructions.
Yes, phasing out unnecessary formatting sounds like a good idea.
Not easy enough. A couple of days ago someone edited
their *own* user
talk page to comment on a completely unrelated article. I asked them
what page they were referring to, and they *emailed* me in response
Okay, I hadn't taken into account the fact that people might overlook or
fail to understand the "Discuss this page" link. But then again, if they
couldn't even get to the right talk page, they wouldn't be able to access
any new features on that talk page either... So I'm not sure that
*anything* can be done for people in the position of your unfortunate
correspondent!
Where were you anyway in the large discussion about
whether we should
switch the entire discussion system to a BBS? I almost single-handedly
defended the wiki way in that discussion. If I hadn't done so, someone
might have set up a BBS already by now.
I must admit I wasn't paying much attention. I thought that was just about
replacing the mailing lists, and I thought the idea was bad enough that it
would be dismissed by everyone, so I pretty much ignored the thread. I
didn't realise it was only you doing most of the dismissing. Sorry about
that...
That's silly, because the people who would benefit
from the feature
could not help in the archiving process anyway -- they could not edit
the page at all! At least now they can say "Post a comment"->"Someone
needs to archive this talk page. I can't edit the whole page anymore."
Well, that's why I suggested a feature for making archiving easier. It's
an alternative way of solving the same problem, but the end result is that
the page is shorter, rather than longer. I think that would be preferable.
Furthermore, if eventually it becomes reasonably
possible to participate
in 100K discussions because the interface allows it (by editing
sections, replying to individual comments and appending new comments at
the bottom), what exactly is the problem? We're not Microsoft -- we
don't need to hardcode the 32K limit.
Well, people might find it annoying to have to wait for a 100K page to
load up, and then scroll through it to find the section they want to
contribute to.
So lang as we don't end up with dumb automatic
archives like [[/Archive
1]], that's fine with me. However, it astonishes me that someone who
whines^Wcomplains^Wtalks as much about "simplicity" would propose a
feature that would substantially complicate the editing process.
I'm just here to be as awkward as possible. ;) Well, no, I only suggested
the archiving idea because it would overcome the problem of people not
being able to edit long pages by giving them a mechanism to shorten them.
It's true that your proposal would also work, but I think that keeping
pages short is generally a good practice, and that making it easier to add
to long pages will discourage people from doing that. So maybe I'm saying
that editing should be made complicated for people who want to add to long
pages, so that they are encouraged to shorten them. :)
Oh, I know, we could just have an "Archive this section" link. When you
click on it, ping! the whole section in [[Talk:Joe Bloggs]] headed "Joe
Bloggs and New Imperialism" is replaced by the line, "Discussion moved to
[[Talk:Joe Bloggs/Joe Bloggs and New Imperialism]]", and that new page is
created at the same time. I think that would be as easy to use as your
features, and although it would complicate the user interface (which I am
generally opposed to) it would simplify talk pages in the sense that they
would end up free of clutter in the form of out-of-date discussions.
You are completely mistaken in your belief that
wiki-editing discussions
is "simple". It's complex and needs to be made easier, if we want to
keep this method of discussing at all. Wading through 20 comments in a
small edit window just to find the one you want to reply to is not
simple, it is time-consuming.
Oh all right, you've convinced me. Maybe reforming how the talk pages work
is a good idea after all. But I'm not convinced that a feature to add new
sections should be one of those reforms. Most additions to talk pages will
be to ongoing discussions anyway, so the feature would rarely need to be
used. Before you decided to remove all criticism of your feature from
[[m:Layout vote]], Bdesham suggested that it would encourage people to
ignore threading, which sounds a good argument to me.
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+
| Oliver Pereira |
| Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science |
| University of Southampton |
| omp199(a)ecs.soton.ac.uk |
+-------------------------------------------+