I agree with this. I have more thoughts on the matter than I have time to write at this exact moment. The group edit paradigm is good for articles, but bad for discussion. In articles, the integrity of the individual's voice is secondary except to isolate vandalism. In discussions, the integrity of the individual's voice is the whole point.
On casual inspection, Wikimedia seems to do OK in preserving the individual's voice on the talk pages... but that's just casual inspection. If participants are actively monitoring their own words for edits, they can enforce the integrity of their own words, but if not, it's open to misrepresentation. You can't really know that without inspecting every diff of the talk page. That's too much to demand of a user and does not encourage discussion. Thus, discussions should be threaded.
If I had infinite time to put into MW, I might try something like mapping each category to a forum, and each MW article name to a thread title. If they chose, users could view MW as a forum skin, seeing only the talk pages and doing nothing but "talking" if they choose. This would encourage non-adversarial discussion, which I think would be a better method of information discovery than the currently prevalent adversarial mode.
-----Original Message----- From: mediawiki-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces@Wikimedia.org]On Behalf Of Lee Daniel Crocker Sent: Saturday, June 04, 2005 11:32 AM To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Yes! Replace talk pages!
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.
-- Lee Daniel Crocker lee@piclab.com http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/
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