Oliver-
The lines intefere with tables, anyway. See:
Alright, that's a killer argument against them. Gone are the lines. I also tested in Konqueror and noted that the "dotted" CSS instruction looks quite ugly in that browser, so perhpas we saw different things. Maybe we can just agree to phase out unnecessary formatting -- lots of articles use bold for headlines, <font...> for table headers etc. This confuses the "edit section" feature, which (correctly) is not triggered on these instructions.
Also, newbies often are confused by the concept of editing a page to comment it, and they will likely expect such a link.
I strongly disagree with this. The wiki way of editing pages is quite easy to learn
Not easy enough. A couple of days ago someone edited their *own* user talk page to comment on a completely unrelated article. I asked them what page they were referring to, and they *emailed* me in response -- the idea of article/talk page separation is simply too complex to grasp immediately for many people. The idea of editing a page to write a comment is even more complex and deviates from standard commenting procedures on other websites.
Not everyone *wants* to contribute, some people just want to provide feedback. That's what "Post a comment" is for -- an easy to understand, immediately usable link that allows people to quickly post their thoughts on an article without learning everything about wikis. From understanding that, however, it's a small step to understanding whole-page-editing, because it happens through essentially the same interface. That way people can learn to *gradually* become wiki contributors, instead of being thrown into the cold water. But "Post a comment" is useful even for long-time contributors because it saves time and energy. I personally saw two long pages today where I would have commented if the feature had already been available, but did not because I did not want to bother to load and go through the whole large talk page.
Where were you anyway in the large discussion about whether we should switch the entire discussion system to a BBS? I almost single-handedly defended the wiki way in that discussion. If I hadn't done so, someone might have set up a BBS already by now. One argument for not using a BBS was that we could simplify talk pages by making them more like common threaded discussions. If people like you oppose such a change, I might as well join the ranks of BBS supporters and rally behind those who want to dump talk pages altogether.
I was thinking of bringing this up myself, but not as a point in your favour! Making it more convenient to add content to pages over 32 KB in size is not a good thing. It would just make the problem worse.
That's silly, because the people who would benefit from the feature could not help in the archiving process anyway -- they could not edit the page at all! At least now they can say "Post a comment"->"Someone needs to archive this talk page. I can't edit the whole page anymore." Furthermore, if eventually it becomes reasonably possible to participate in 100K discussions because the interface allows it (by editing sections, replying to individual comments and appending new comments at the bottom), what exactly is the problem? We're not Microsoft -- we don't need to hardcode the 32K limit.
Perhaps when editing a large page, the software could pick out sections (in the same way that the "Table of contents" feature does) and ask if you want to archive them before adding new content. Just a thought...
So lang as we don't end up with dumb automatic archives like [[/Archive 1]], that's fine with me. However, it astonishes me that someone who whines^Wcomplains^Wtalks as much about "simplicity" would propose a feature that would substantially complicate the editing process.
I really don't think that making the Wikipedia more complicated, as many of your innovations seem to do,
You are completely mistaken in your belief that wiki-editing discussions is "simple". It's complex and needs to be made easier, if we want to keep this method of discussing at all. Wading through 20 comments in a small edit window just to find the one you want to reply to is not simple, it is time-consuming. Having to deal with "edit conflicts" because someone commented at the same time is incredibly annoying and confusing, and who knows how many comments were discarded because of it. (We can gradually fix this by eliminating edit conflicts when people are editing different sections, and eliminating them altogether for append edits.) And not being able to just start a new discussion without having to load discussions that may have happened months earlier into the edit box is quite braindead.
Alongside the wiki world, powerful and easy to use discussion systems have emerged. They are used daily by thousands and thousands of average, clueless Windows users. Sit one of them in front of a wiki discussion and they will look at you with glassy eyes and ask you where the "Post comment" or "Reply to this" links are, and how to produce an animated smiley with a beer keg. We won't give them the animated smileys, but we should give them a navigational structure that is reasonably similar to the systems they are familiar with. We should learn from other projects, exactly *because* we should make things as simple as possible.
Regards,
Erik