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.