Current talk pages are extremely unfriendly. I think they should be abandoned and replaced by more "natural" system of posting.
Tomasz,
please read my post
http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikitech-l/2002-December/001758.html
for some problems with this approach, and for the alternative, which still allows us to use the wiki-advantages (of which there are plenty!) while having "reply" links and reducing edit conflicts. The relevant portion of the above post on what I think we should do:
- Auto-merge after edit conflicts. Do a paragraph-wise comparison, merge when paras are the same or new, trigger conflict when paras are different. Show warning when another user has recently started editing a page. - Make better use of existing comment demarcation. When a user inserts a sig --~~~ this could be used to also render a "reply to this comment" link. This link could lead to a blank edit form, the content of which would be automatically inserted in indented form after the comment in question. - Have better context-sensitive help. Our current editing screen is nice and all, but it could use some refinements to direct users to pertinent information.
[New: As for the last point, if we use the comment demarcation approach described above, we need to make sure that everyone understands the ~~~ syntax, and possibly change it. Right now this is a bit of a "secret" that every newbie discovers at some point.]
Regards,
Erik