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Timwi wrote:
OTOH, the currenty wikipages are not really suited to discussions at all - I'd rather not have someone edit my "posts" - whether it be for fixing the speling or whatever.
Well, I for one would object to any system that doesn't allow me to edit other people's comments. It's too useful to let traditionalism and conservatism ruin it. It's not just about fixing atrocious spellings, it's also about removing objectionable parts of comments without removing the entire comment, or about summarising an unnecessarily long piece of prose. I don't see any point in listing the advantages here since wikis have shown time and again that they work, and Wikipedia wasn't the first. Yes, it defies the well-established and widely loved web forum paradigm where everyone "owns" their own comments, but we're not a web forum, we're a wiki, and wiki is our paradigm.
Timwi
Any model, if over applied, is harmful. Making things into discussion fora that do not lend themselves to such a model can only result in the imposing of restrictions upon content which are harmful to the capability of the model.
Thus, in applying a model, it is important to recognize what it was intended for, and what it is good at doing. A Wiki model is good for quasi-static documents (depends on time of access, but not on query), whereas a forum is good for an ongoing discussion. What about a discussion that is itself a document? I see two approaches to this problem: 1) Implement the new LiquidThreads model, which combines the two models. 2) Add discussion-specific metadata syntax to the Wiki syntax to allow for specialized handling of discussions.
Expanding on this second point, consider something like this:
Current format: ==NPOV Complaint== This page is not NPOV! --Someuser :Why not? --Author ::Because of... :We need more justification than that. --Otheruser ::Well, there's...
Proposed format: @topic ==NPOV Complaint== @comment This page is not NPOV! --Someuser @/comment @c:Why not? --Author @/c @c::Because of... @/c @c:We need more justification than that. --Otheruser @/c @c::Well, there's... @/c @/topic
where @c is shorthand for @comment, and the colons following the @c tell MW how nested it is. If you find this markup ugly, suggest something else; I thought of this off the top of my head. - --Chris