Jimmy Wales jwales@bomis.com writes:
One useful "middle of the road" solution is to *refactor* rather than *delete* the /Talk. That is, to rewrite the talk page to sum up the debate that was held, giving the rationale for the existing version of the page. This leaves things a bit more open to further debate, while at the same time "cleaning house" in a useful way.
That sounds like a plan. Did that on the LISP talk page.
I'd still like to keep past discussion from new suggestions. Either by using new "standard" subpages (e.g. /Reasoning vs. /OpenPoints), or by sectioning /Talk. The last is probably better until /Talk really "fills up".
All in all, I think that no *simple* policy can be stated.
Nevertheless, I've added the following to Wikipedia_policy:
Whenever you change something on a page because of a request, report, or discussion on the associated /Talk page, be sure to refactor /Talk accordingly.