Steve Summit wrote:
Ec wrote:
Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
There is somewhere a recommendation that Talk be refactored. Right now, what I see, everywhere I've looked, is that Talk pages are simply archived. And then the same debates occur over and over...
Refactoring talk pages is an old notion that was already there when I became involved in early 2002. I tried it then on a couple of occasions, and found it to be an incredibly difficult task.
A "refactor" that I've long thought could be useful would be if every article (potentially) had, along with its Talk page, a Rationale page. The Rationale page would explain, in as much details as was necessary, why the article is written as it is, why it says the things it says, and why it does not say the things it does not say. The Rationale would evolve and change over time, just like the article. The Rationale would *not* grow inexorably over time; it would not need archiving as talk pages do. (It might have an interesting history, just as articles do.)
In particular, the Rationale would not be a talk page; it would not have individual, ~~~~-signed entries. It would, potentially, be as carefully written (rewritten and polished) as the article itself. It would, in a sense, be a mirror of the article, but targeted at editors rather than readers.
Some articles are already doing this sort of thing in an ad-hoc way, often using subpages of the talk page. (I'm thinking, for example, of [[Talk:Muhammad]] and its subpage [[Talk:Muhammad/images]], although that subpage is a topic-specific talk page, not a Rationale as I've described here.)
I don't oppose the idea, and would certainly support giving it a chance to succeed. Still I'm sceptical about the outcome. My first impression is that it would become a special variation of the talk page. That is certainly contrary to your theory, but the forces of undiscipline are quite likely to overwhelm the theory.
Ec