On Thu, Sep 11, 2014 at 8:21 AM, Wil Sinclair wllm@wllm.com wrote:
Tim, do you think that this list of all the useful stuff that talk pages can currently includes things that aren't being done because they are too advanced for newbie editors or too inconvenient for veterans?
Regardless, you make a strong argument for keeping a meta-document that spans threads and/or should be more persistent. A lot of this stuff seems indispensable to recording decisions and linking to stuff that backs them up, avoiding constant rehashing of issues. My concern is how such a documents could be tied to pertinent threads in the discussion oriented software. Maybe we could create anchors in such a document that could make it easier for the right sections to be displayed alongside threads that reference them in the UI.
The concept of a meta document, which uses wikitext and is editable using VE, would alleviate a lot of the concerns about Flow. It would be relatively simple to change processes from using 'Talk:x' to using 'MetaDoc:x' (still a big migration task, but less problematic than going through process re-engineering for every Wikipedia process in 250+ projects with their own language).
If that meta document also had a talk namespace (MetaDocTalk:x), which uses wikitext, the old-timers (and bots) will still have a place to hold discussions and post notes using wikitext if they wish to.