On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 20:17 -0500, Muzaffer Ozakca wrote:
As I said, my goal is not replacing talk pages but give my users a separate forum.
I think replacing talk pages altogether is a much better goal. Matt's right--there's too much disorganized data out there that needs to be integrated into something simpler and with better connections. The choice of how a user interacts with a discussion should be decoupled from the choices of what to discuss and with whom; we should be able to choose a group and a topic first, then use whatever software we're comfortable with to participate.
Wiki pages shouldn't have associated talk /pages/, they should have associated /forums/, where the comments are are stored by date with proper source ID, so that user's can do things like "show me all comments from user X, whom I respect", "killfile idiot Z", "show me comments within this date range", and so on. These could also be gatewayed to/from email lists or usenet groups to which users could subscribe or unsubscribe at will (by adding the forum to their watchlist, for example). Maybe even IRC talks could be integrated somehow.
It would be good to integrate the software, so that it would share a common feel and flow (i.e., "discuss" button on the page leads to the forum, the forum had features for including page text to comment on, and so forth). I don't think that would be easy with a third party tool like phpbb; but maybe it could be hacked.