On 8/17/06, Steve Summit scs@eskimo.com wrote:
But this reminds me of an idea I had yesterday for ordinary pages, which might apply to policy and other project-space pages too. Right now, for every page, there's an associated talk page. What if every page had *two* associated pages, "Talk" and "Rationale"? Talk would be as it is now, but Rationale would be a mostly-static (or at any rate as static as the main page) description of *why* the main page says what it says, and why it does not say the things it does not say. That is, it would contain the distilled consensus of everything you'd want a would-be editor of the article to see, but which mere readers would have no need for.
Doesn't a <!-- comment --> up the top of the page serve that purpose very well? I'm always impressed when I see good ones, that explain "No, point X does not need to be made, it's linked in paragraph 3" etc.
Today, talk pages sort of perform this function, but they're so free-wheeling, and so subject to various ad-hoc kinds of archiving, that it's an arbitrarily hard problem for a new editor (who's trying to be responsible) to discover whether there's any precedent or prior argument behind a change he's about to make, that might be controversial or have been tried before and decided against.
You can also segregate that kind of long term standing agreement to a special section up the top of the talk page.
Steve