[Wikipedia-l] New stuff on test.wiki

[Daniel Mayer]

Erik wrote:
>...
>"Post a comment" is really only part 
>of a larger puzzle. "Edit section" is  
>part of the same puzzle and also makes 
>discussions a lot easier. However, 
>that's primarily intended for articles; 
>what we really need is a "Reply" function 
>to complement the "Post a comment" 
>function. This is tricky to implement, 
>because you need to auto-render the reply 
>links somehow (my idea is to use the sigs 
>as markers, but these are sometimes also u
>sed in a non-comment context). At that 
>point we can also auto-sign comments that  
>are entered using either feature, so we 
>won't have to teach newbies the meaning of
>the four tildes anymore. This, however, will 
>only be possible if we retain the "Post a 
>comment" functionality, because that is one of  
>the two ways to participate in a discussion 
>-- reply in an existing thread or start a 
>new one.
>....

Interesting idea - let's see how this works. :) 

We don't allow ads in articles and are pretty good at
enforcing this policy even though it is /very/ easy to
post add links in articles. So just because the
technical limitations regarding editing a really long
page are taken away doesn't necessarily mean that
really long articles and talk pages will be more
common. We just need to establish a cultural norm that
articles and talk pages should not be larger than
30KB. There are very valid reasons to have such a
"policy" that do not touch on the technical
limitations. The most important of which is that we
are an encyclopedia and having articles of that length
are exhausting to read through and difficult to add
information to. In short, we need to encourage people
to summarize article topics and create daughter
articles that expand on particular points. 

Our Germany article on en.wiki does this well;
[[Germany]] is a broad overview of all major aspects
of Germany. In that article is a short very broad
overview of German history and a link to [[History of
Germany]]. That article is fully devoted to a broad
overview of German history. And each of the sections
of that article have links to individual articles that
expand on the topic of that section (not to mention
the regular wiki links to individual topics). This
allows the reader to get a good idea of the various
topics without forcing them to read too much about
topics they are not interested in. This allows the
contributor to quickly skip past the overviews and get
to a particular article that is only about one part of
German history so that they can add to it (very large
articles are rarely so well organized that sections
could play the same role - but TOCs should help that
situation a bit...).   

>...
>Discussions should not be endless, but they 
>should also not be cut short by an immediate 
>call to the polling box. That's just 
>frustrating for everyone involved and will 
>not produce good results, because we need 
>to listen to each other before we can really 
>make a decision based on more than just gut 
>feelings.
>...

I agree. We furthermore need an established process to
decide when to vote and how to set up votes. Right now
the decision to have a vote is rather arbitrary and
the votes are very often /horribly/ set-up (the count
reform vote is a notable exception) and the results
very confused and open to drastically different
interpretations (like the date format vote). IMO
voting is next to the last thing we should try to
resolve issues (the last being reliance on our
benevolent dictator to make a decree - Hi Jimbo!). We
should bend over backwards to reach a consensus first.


-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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