On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 7:33 AM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: I downloaded the Google toolbar specifically to try out the side-wiki but the icon has remained greyed out whenever I've looked at it. I've heard reports of people giving it a go without such a problem, so not sure what's going on and I haven't really felt moved to investigate. I heard a radio show discussing side-wiki and one issue they raised was that it gave web owners no control over what people said about their site in the wiki (as opposed, say, to on-site comments).

On Thu, Oct 22, 2009 at 2:33 AM, Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: I rather like the first ("most helpful") sidewiki comment from the main page: "Sidewiki provides what Wikipedia has long needed. A place for people to discuss an article or its topic without discussing the editing of it. This gives people an outlet without cluttering discussion pages with what amount to forum posts." I think we should have done this a long time ago ourselves, in the same way that Wikinews does it with a third tab after the article and the talk page for venting and non-editing-related discussion. But I haven't seen anything really compelling about sidewiki in particular yet. It seems like a crippled alternative to the "blog comments" Firefox plugin Google used to have but then disabled. -Sage

Charles Matthews <charles.r.matthews(a)ntlworld.com> wrote: Its a good question. There have been web annotation tools out there for a while, and while it would make sense for WP, there are caveats. The main one is that it does not make sense for anyone to just use one on their own - some coordination has to be involved, and if coordination is involved, some selection of which web annotation tool we use is necessary. In that context an open source tool like ShiftSpace will probably be of higher concern than a Google tool, but OTOH if Google made something that was extremely popular these concerns might be on the back board at least until something free and usable. It's long been my opinion that we need a web annotation system for WP, but someone will probably just retort with a comment like: "*cough* 'talk pages?'" The idea behind web annotation on WP is to basically have meta tweets about editorial points from an interface that's even easier than wiki editing of the article or talk pages. An annotation layer could do at least things that our current setup cannot: 1) It could be easier to make a quick editorial note 2) that note could point directly to a specific item of text. If we take this kind of functionality - a div layer with editable notes probably - and integrate it into our current system - automatic (redundant) posting to a new talk page section... Eh. I could go on. And Mr. Ross just chimed in ahead of me.. -Stevertigo