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Moin,
On Tuesday 01 November 2005 17:01, Christopher E. Granade wrote:
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.
I have to stongly agree. Part of the problems with the current discussions are:
*people editing other people's comment, making it appear that person X said Y, while they instead did say "!Y". (I can see lawsuits happen already... ) * people forgetting to sign their name/date, re-arrangement of comments any any other things that make it virtually impossible to reconstruct a discussion (remember, a discussion not only needs to track who said what, but also when, e.g. in which order where things said)
Yes, all changes are theoretically in the history, but good luck in reconstructing the page after some amounts of edits.
* you cannot collapse parts of a discussioin thread, because there is no structure/tree/thread etc - it is all a flat text. * likewise, seeing hat changed last on the discussion page involves the cumbersome history - you cannot simple read the last entries on a long page after some time because they are all merged into the same flat text.
A discussion thread is simple not the same as an article, and I think the wiki principle cannot work good for it. However, see below:
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.
What I had in mind that the discussion page could be constructed from a series of "posts". Each post would be a wiki-mini-article in itself. Thus you get the tree structure (can collapse threads sort them etc), plus the "show me the latest posts", and you still have the "edit other people's text" feature. You need no new markup, it probably suffices to have a front-end that can collect the posts (all articles in name-space "MyArticle::Discussion::Post?) and display them on one page, with edit buttons etc per post.
You could even make it so that when the original author requests this, only admins can edit/delete this post (in case of trouble). If the author does request it, anybody can edit the text.
You could even have a "this post was last edited by XYZ on ABC" - thus showing immidiately that the original author wasn't the last one to touch the text and thus giving you a hint to look at the history.
Currently you would need always check the history to spot malicous modifications.
Threading by subject, time etc are all possible because these are just rearangements of the post articles.
Btw, even if the main wikipedia does not use this new discussion style, a lot of small wikis could benefit greatly from an improved discussion page. The current model ends in quite a chaos after a while.
Expanding on this second point, consider something like this:
Current format: ==NPOV Complaint== This page is not NPOV! --Someuser
[snip]
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.
Oh, please not more markup to remember, parse and translate. I think a real one-article-per-post model would solve the problem more elegant. ;)
Btw, I do not know what Liquidthreads is, but if it works like what I proposed, just count me in favour of it :)
Best wishes,
Tels
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"You know the world is going crazy when the best rapper is a white guy, the best golfer is a black guy, the tallest guy in the NBA is Chinese, the Swiss hold the America's Cup, France is accusing the U.S. of arrogance, Germany doesn't want to go to war, and the three most powerful men in America are named 'Bush', 'Dick', and 'Colon'. Need I say more?" -Chris Rock