I don't know how many people here remember their first discussion on
WP, but I do. Probably because it was less than 6 months ago. :)
My first impression was "you have got to be kidding me". I was annoyed
I had to learn a new markup dialect, but that didn't deter me. Since I
had some experience with wiki software when it was still cool about a
decade ago, I chalked it up to the Weltanschauung that a wiki can do
almost anything. I've always thought that there is a clause missing
from this mindset: "and 99% of that it does poorly". I think that
discussions easily find themselves in that 99%. But I wonder if there
is a way that Flow can sit on top of wiki markup; many document
oriented databases back discussion software, so why can't we reuse all
the work done in formatting, version, and handling conflicts for
discussions? Is it possible that discussions can be implemented
without changing the data layer at all?
FWIW, I signed my first comment by hand. I missed the comments about
sigs in the wikitext editor interface. If it weren't for my family
situation, I'm pretty sure I would have bailed. In any case, it was
much easier to engage at WO, and that was partly- but not mostly- due
to the fact that they run discussion software over there.
,Wil
On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 7:24 AM, Marc A. Pelletier <marc(a)uberbox.org> wrote:
On 09/08/2014 10:18 AM, Risker wrote:
The most obvious one is automatic signing of
comments, and it is
something that we have technically been able to impose for years; sinebot
didn't come into existence in a vacuum.
I suppose that's a philosophical divergence between us then - that
sinebot even needs to exist to me is demonstration that the system is
broken.
You say that discussion isn't all that much harder than editing content.
Even if I agreed with that (and I do not, edit conflicts in articles
are much rarer than on talk pages - and usually easier to sort out),
that's not a *good* thing!
Participating in discussion should be much, *much* easier than editing
articles: encouraging newbies to seek help and participate in the
community *before* diving in anything but trivial article edits would be
an immensely powerful retention tool!
(Which isn't to say that editing articles doesn't *also* need a lot of
help - but that's a different project).
-- Marc
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