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, with new participants who have not read the old debate, so more time is wasted explaining everything over and over. It is *incredibly* inefficient, and inefficiency is not fatal when new editors keep pouring in. But it burns editors out, in the end, and that stream of new users will dry up. I've called it a pyramid scheme. It works as long as new blood keeps appearing.
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. Not everybody can do it. It is even more difficult than good copyediting in article space. It could also lead to complaints from purveyors of nonsense that their nonsense is being censored.
Archiving doesn't help, especially when those archive pages are accompanied by a warning that they are not to have further comments added. Some of the shorter threads on a talk page might do well to be revived, especially when they deal with an easily refuted but popular misconception. If a topic is subject to constant dispute the talk page and its related archives become an unmanageable multitude that would deter anyone from looking to them for answers. An improvement might be to archive by topic or question instead of by date as is currently done, but that would involve more work than simply using cut and past for everything added before a given date.
New editors that raise questions are more plentiful than new editors that answer them. The answering editors can soon develop a siege mentality when they need to keep answering what they perceive to be the same questions. The result may very well be an inability to recognize changes in the question.
Ec