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
2008/5/25 Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net:
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.
Would listing talk page archives with a short list of matters discussed help? (I've tried this and it's a lot of work.)
- d.
David Gerard wrote:
2008/5/25 Ray Saintonge:
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 paste for everything added before a given date.
Would listing talk page archives with a short list of matters discussed help? (I've tried this and it's a lot of work.)
It would be a step in the right direction, and I agree it would be a lot of work. It still leaves open the possibility for frequently discussed problems to have their own separate archive pages.
Ec
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.)
At 09:10 PM 5/25/2008, you 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.)
Actually, the Rationale page, if it gets long, would be broken into subpages. It *would* grow. As disputes arise and are resolved, the nature of the dispute would be detailed -- in NPOV fashion, what else! -- and the consensus reached explained. Thus disputes create a new kind of content, content about content and how it came to be how it is. This would *not* create any new policy, but I'd think an editor wanting to change an article in a way that was tried before would be expected to read the Rationale page and address the reasons or arguments there. The point is certainly not to freeze consensus, but to *build* it, efficiently.
The Rationale page would be, in fact, what seems to have been considered at one time the function of Talk. Problem is, Talk grew and grew and grew, and the refactoring involved in making into Rationale was never done. Just more and more talk, archived, and who goes through all those archives before editing the article? Few, I'm sure, because I see the same arguments repeated over and over, and then someone else, maybe, if they are still editing, repeats the same answers, wasting everyone's time.
The Rationale page would, at least in part, be organized similarly to the article, and thus it would be easy to find rationale for a specific section of the article. One could then review the arguments, the sources that aren't directly incorporated in the article, etc., and decide if some new change really should be made. Edits to the Rationale page would not be signed. It's essentially an article about how the article came to be the way it is, NPOV, with sourcing requirements just like the article, except that here Wikipedia edits are admissible sources, and attribution of arguments may also be appropriate.
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.
Great minds think alike.
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.)
Subpages should be used much more often than they are. I've seen some wrong-headed MfDs, one was on a subpage of an article, consisting of sources supporting a POV. Extensive list. It was not an article, it was not linked from an article, it was for the use of editors. Who were free to turn it into a neutral page, to add notes impeaching sources, and all the rest. Add. Generally not delete, except for fraudulent citations. Thus the work that editors do accumulates and makes it easier for those who come later.
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