Erik wrote:

... "Post a comment" is really only part of a larger puzzle. "Edit section" is part of the same puzzle and also makes discussions a lot easier. However, that's primarily intended for articles; what we really need is a "Reply" function to complement the "Post a comment" function. This is tricky to implement, because you need to auto-render the reply links somehow (my idea is to use the sigs as markers, but these are sometimes also u sed in a non-comment context). At that point we can also auto-sign comments that are entered using either feature, so we won't have to teach newbies the meaning of the four tildes anymore. This, however, will only be possible if we retain the "Post a comment" functionality, because that is one of the two ways to participate in a discussion -- reply in an existing thread or start a new one. ....

Interesting idea - let's see how this works. :)

We don't allow ads in articles and are pretty good at enforcing this policy even though it is /very/ easy to post add links in articles. So just because the technical limitations regarding editing a really long page are taken away doesn't necessarily mean that really long articles and talk pages will be more common. We just need to establish a cultural norm that articles and talk pages should not be larger than 30KB. There are very valid reasons to have such a "policy" that do not touch on the technical limitations. The most important of which is that we are an encyclopedia and having articles of that length are exhausting to read through and difficult to add information to. In short, we need to encourage people to summarize article topics and create daughter articles that expand on particular points.

Our Germany article on en.wiki does this well; [[Germany]] is a broad overview of all major aspects of Germany. In that article is a short very broad overview of German history and a link to [[History of Germany]]. That article is fully devoted to a broad overview of German history. And each of the sections of that article have links to individual articles that expand on the topic of that section (not to mention the regular wiki links to individual topics). This allows the reader to get a good idea of the various topics without forcing them to read too much about topics they are not interested in. This allows the contributor to quickly skip past the overviews and get to a particular article that is only about one part of German history so that they can add to it (very large articles are rarely so well organized that sections could play the same role - but TOCs should help that situation a bit...).

... Discussions should not be endless, but they should also not be cut short by an immediate call to the polling box. That's just frustrating for everyone involved and will not produce good results, because we need to listen to each other before we can really make a decision based on more than just gut feelings. ...

I agree. We furthermore need an established process to decide when to vote and how to set up votes. Right now the decision to have a vote is rather arbitrary and the votes are very often /horribly/ set-up (the count reform vote is a notable exception) and the results very confused and open to drastically different interpretations (like the date format vote). IMO voting is next to the last thing we should try to resolve issues (the last being reliance on our benevolent dictator to make a decree - Hi Jimbo!). We should bend over backwards to reach a consensus first.

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)

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