On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 12:48 AM, Samuel Kleinmeta.sj@gmail.com wrote:
On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 1:41 PM, Carcharothcarcharothwp@googlemail.com wrote:
Ironically, wikis are so far the online medium which have done best at long-term conversations: I routinely see talk page conversations where the gaps between one message and another may be a year or three. This is not something I've ever been able to say of email lists, IRC chat, IM, newsgroups, social sites, web aggregators, most every blog...
Probably to do with the stable central point - the page being discussed. All the other mediums you mention are transient. New articles hardly anyone returns to. Here, the encyclopedia pages are (in theory) kept up-to-date.
When there is a namespace set aside for central points, such as individual topics, wikis do this brilliantly. But many wiki processes simply archive without a central point (or have a week-long discussion which is then frozen, no more discussion to be had).
One aspect of a community facilitation project would be to define a namespace for issues, which might be moved and renamed over time, but would not be 'closed' or 'archived' because someone though a particular proposed implementation was not a good idea. If someone thought it was an issue to consider, then it is a valid point in the namespace, and will always be so. Someone else might come up with a great resolution to that issue in the future; it might be effectively merged with other similar issues; it mght be better understood as a combination of two resolvable issues.
Or it might just remain, with fluctuating priority, as something intractable yet important-to-someone.
For instance, I was looking for the latest thoughts on the topic of 'How to create notability guidelines for a new category' (since [[Category:Wikipedia notability guidelines]] is pretty sparse) without success.
And the a little while before that I wanted to see who else thought G8 shouldn't be used to speedy delete talk pages or subpages with valuable discussions. I had a specific example that would have contributed to the idea that talk pages should be preserved... but there was only a scattering of a dozen discussions across many different talkpage archives.
A permanent page for each of these issues, perhaps with one or more self-selected facilitators willing to help incorporate new thoughts and more towards a long-term resolution, would be interesting. To start with, you could seed the issues namespace with the perennial proposals. [[WP:PEREN]] does not do these justice; and in short order a good facilitator could replace each of the "Reason for previous rejection" statements with a reworded but equally accurate "Current compromise or resolution".
Is there a suitable place on-wiki to put a summary of some of the points in this thread?
Carcharoth