I think we need to have an open ended discussion about "Talk" pages and what we could do to improve them. I see primarily the following problems:

- It tends to be cumbersome to search for the right place to insert a comment in a huge thread with sometimes correctly, sometimes incorrectly indented comments. - Many users, newbies or not, tend to quote, indent etc. in uncommon ways. It's a bit like email in that respect: Give people too many options to make mistakes, and they will do so. - Edit conflicts are very likely especially in near-realtime-talk. This is *very* distracting and one of our biggest usability issues.

Here's what I think we can 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.

The alternative would be to replace the talk page with threaded discussions a la Kuro5hin/Slashdot. Individual comments should still have all wiki capabilities, but users would not be allowed to edit other users' comments, and there would be a clear thread structure. Also, stuff like signing etc. would no longer be necessary. Issues with this idea:

- editing other users' comments is sometimes desirable - archival? perhaps thread creator and sysops could have "archive this thread" link - being able to write wherever you want can be good to alert users, e.g. put important notices at the top - this requires advanced features like "sticky" posts in a discussion forum - should deletion of one's own comments be possible? - revision history? - having two different "modes" of writing can be a usability problem, too

Weighing the different arguments against each other, I think we should concentrate on the edit conflict issues, and perhaps try to somewhat streamline the reply process. Having a threaded forum seems to be too different from the existing wiki process to work well, although I am still somewhat undecided here. The edit conflict issue is relevant to all pages, not just talk pages.

What do you all think?

Regards,

Erik