On 01/11/05, Christopher E. Granade cgranade@greens.org wrote:
I think what you allude to in wikimode discussion forums could be solved by establishing a Scratch: namespace that mirrors the global namespace (e.g.: Scratch:Template:NPOV) that is not considered to be "finished." During development of new formats, or extensive editing, provisional changes could be placed under Scratch, and such suggestions could be referenced from LiquidThreads.
Well, my initial reaction to this was "Yuk!" - the whole wiki is supposed to be subject to "extensive editting". Even by having a separate discussion namespace, we've rather removed the incentive to refactor discussions into content or summaries, to our own detriment. Splitting it even further into mostly-stable articles, hard-structured discussions, and unstructured "scratch buffers" would be like having an open-access CMS-cum-wiki, a forum system, and a traditional wiki operating in parallel, which all seems rather stifling. I know that's not what you were suggesting, but it's a kind of worst-case scenario of going down that path.
OTOH, I guess there is some kind of logic to saying that if we're going to force discussion pages to act like classical discussions, we need somewhere else to put their other purposes - and it's true that people already use them as "scratch". I just think we need to be careful in making things too structured, lest we lose the immediacy that is the whole point of being a wiki in the first place.
-- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]