On 31/10/05, Uwe Brauer oub@mat.ucm.es wrote:
One of the inconvenience of the discussion page in wikipedia is the fact that does not have a mail-client type of interface/display. That is neither there is a email-summary type of display, nor a display which would allow to display the threads easily.
Are there any plans to include such a feature.
This has been discussed before (I haven't any links to hand, but the usual Googling with "site:mail.wikipedia.org" should turn things up from these lists), but the central problem is that the current setup has no internal representation of a single thread, let alone a single comment, only of a whole page (roughly equivalent to a forum, or a mailbox). The individual threads could potentially be interpretted out by looking at headers, though these aren't used entirely consistently, but it would require quite complex and unreliable pattern matching to separate what humans can easily see as the individual comments.
Furthermore, this is in some ways an *advantage* - all the old-fashioned wiki processes, like refactoring and so on, can take place on the discussion page, unrestricted by structure imposed by the software. One intriguing compromise was the "LiquidThreads" proposal, at http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LiquidThreads, but I'd consider it more of an "idea" than a "planned feature"...
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]