Personally, I've given up on talk pages. The reason is many of them don't have actual "talk". I see a blue talk link and go there and all that is there is a template "this page is part of wiki project xyz". I'd really like it if that kind of information about a page was somewhere other than "talk".
Sent from my iPhone
On Oct 12, 2011, at 1:56, Carcharoth carcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Gwern Branwen gwern0@gmail.com wrote:
Pondering the utility of talk page edits recently, I've begun to wonder: how many of our readers actually look at the talk page as well? I know some writers writing articles on Wikipedia have mentioned or rhapsodized at length on the interest of the talk pages for articles, but they are rare birds and statistically irrelevant.
<snip long analysis>
I suggest that the common practice of 'moving reference/link to the Talk page' be named what it really is: a subtle form of deletion.
Well, only if there is no discussion. I think moving to the talk page is far better than outright removal. It does at least give editors a chance to review what has been included and what has been excluded. And talk pages *should* be for editors and not really for readers. I frequently use the talk pages to help draft articles and as a place to put material that I'm not quite sure is ready for inclusion yet. Putting everything straight into an article can make it harder to organise things later.
It would be a service to our readers to end this practice entirely: if a link is good enough to be hidden on a talk page (supposedly in the interests of incorporating it in the future*), then it is good enough to put at the end of External Links or a Further Reading section, and our countless thousands of readers will not be deprived of the chance to make use of it.
I agree absolutely that external links and further reading should be used far more than they are. I think the problem is that people are paranoid about link farms and link spam and look at number of links rather than quality or organisation. It does help to organise very large external link sections into subsections, both to help readers (in finding what may be of interest) and the editors (in trimming where needed and organsing what is there).
- one of my little projects is compiling edits where I or another have
added a valuable source to an article Talk page, complete with the most relevant excerpts from that source, and seeing whether anyone bothered making any use of that source/link in any fashion. I have not finished, but to summarize what I have seen so far: that justification for deletion is a dirty lie. Hardly any sources are ever restored.
If there is no discussion, you would be fully justified in adding the source yourself. If there is discussion, then, well, you need to discuss. Have a look at my recent talk page edits for one way in which I use article talk pages. The other aspect to all this is that many editors make editorial decisions silently, in their head, or briefly mentioned in edit summaries, and it can be hard for later editors to understand why something was cut or trimmed down. If a longer explanation is posted to the talk page, that can help, though for the largest articles, having mini-essays on the talk page explaining how each individual section of the article was put together would be a massive undertaking. What I do think would be helpful is a subpage for each article (or article talk page), listing the rejected material (sometimes the material is better placed in a different article). That would save a lot of repetition and aid organisation not only of the included material, but the excluded material.
Carcharoth
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