On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 12:40 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
Surreptitiousness wrote:
stevertigo wrote:
So the question is, how do we aggregate and sort arguments such that we can apply a meta process for quickly discerning good, valid, arguments, from those that aren't? Other than "IAR" that is?
Didn't we used to reformat discussions? Maybe we need to re-integrate that into our tool-box.
Refactoring talk pages being one of those things that work in theory but not in practice, I can see why it became less popular (perhaps is extinct). These days some pages with many talk archives could probably do with their own FAQ.
Indeed. There is a bot that can help index talk page archives. I'll give details below.
The best talk page archives ones are accessible both chronologically, and by topic, and have a well-organised FAQ to pick out the main points for people new to the article. This does, of course, presume that lengthy talk page archives are needed for all articles (some need very little talk page discussion at all). Some subject are genuinely controversial (i.e. in the real-world as well as here) and need discussion. Others are more cranks or obsessives arguing back and forth endlessly. Or politically-active people soapboxing. Wikipedia deals with that very poorly.
The best articles, unsurprisingly, are where a good team of editors and writers (and not too large a team either) work together to produce a great article. It would be great if that sort of teamwork happened on some of the messy articles, but the very existence of highly-charged emotions puts off some of the people that could help fix things. And some people are happy to just argue incessantly, rather than move forward and end up with a better article.
Details are here:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Wikipedia:Arbitration/Requests/Cas...
More links:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Talk_page_guidelines
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Read_the_archives
Examples:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Intelligent_design/FAQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Barack_Obama/FAQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Global_warming/FAQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Evolution/FAQ
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Muhammad/FAQ
Search for talk page FAQs:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special%3ASearch&redirs=1&...
Search for indexed archives:
http://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Special:Search&ns1=1&redir...
Talk page archive indexing bot:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:HBC_Archive_Indexerbot
Examples of bot-generated indexes:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Iran/Archive_index
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:United_States/Archive_index
Example of manually maintained talk page archive index:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Talk:Che_Guevara/Archive_index
How successful these approaches are, does need some looking at.
Carcharoth