"With the Foundation's support"
Is there a board resolution on this matter ? I think the question of how we talk to each other is a question even more important than the license problems. As there was a referendum on the license change, I think there should be a referendum on the talk pages' software change.
"it's been used in a production context on the strategy wiki,"
This is an alternative wording for saying that the Strategy wiki's users have been used as guinea pigs for software experiments without their consent. Being treated as a guinea pig means in my case that my computer freezes. I want apologies for this and that the software is removed from the strategy wiki.
This software should be called "Liquidthreat" because it is a threat to community life. For example the disparition of fixed tables of contents and archiving numbers, preventing to memorize where a talk page you have contributed to or enjoyed reading is located. For example the "protecting individual discussion threads" feature which is an invitation to censorship. For example the "summary" feature which is an invitation to gross misinterpretations of other people's opinions. For example the possibility to reactivate old talks from two years ago, instead of linking to their location in their archive as a reference and starting a new fresh talk, contributing to a prospect of never-ending "monster talks"...
The worst is probably the waste of screen space which prevents people with a small screen to "understand" the structucture of the talks, and to find quickly which message an answer is supposed to be answering, and who is the last person who talked. Even finding the edit box in the middle of a long page, playing with the vertical scroll bar, is not easy.
Wiki talk pages are dense, and this enables to quickly discriminate between what is important and what is not.
Wiki talk pages are easily turned into archives and can subsequently be used as references.
Wiki talk pages as they are now are good. Don't kill them.
2009/12/16, Andrew Garrett agarrett@wikimedia.org:
Hi all,
With the Foundation's support, I've spent the last few months churning away at LiquidThreads [1], a new discussion system that is proposed for use on Wikimedia projects.
LiquidThreads has been in alpha testing on Wikimedia Labs [2] for several months, and, more recently, it's been used in a production context on the strategy wiki, where it has been quite well-received.