Current talk pages are extremely unfriendly. I think they should be abandoned and replaced by more "natural" system of posting.
Article would contain: "Comment this article" and "View comments" links, with second present only if there are any. Occasional readers would be more willing to comment articles that way, with interface they are more familiar with.
Every comment would contain posting user name (or "Anonymous"), date, and "Reply" post.
Unlike K5, we don't want to keep posts forever, so some magic would be necessary to take care of old posts. Automatic expiration wouldn't be any good - some issues are resolved very quickly, others may stay for months.
I think that posts should have 3 states: current, old and deleted. Everyone should be able to move posts between current and old status, and sysops should be able to delete and undelete posts. Old posts should not be displayed in defalt "View comments", (some "Show also old comments" link should be provided), and deleted posts should be visible only to sysops.
Markup should be interpretted normally in posts, but some extra care should be taken that no formatting bomb will be placed in them.
On Tue, Jan 07, 2003 at 12:23:11PM -0800, Brion Vibber wrote:
On mar, 2003-01-07 at 09:13, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Current talk pages are extremely unfriendly. I think they should be abandoned and replaced by more "natural" system of posting.
You mean, not a wiki?
Exactly.
I think not.
Wiki is not any good for discussion. There have been many complaints from people who know Wiki well that talking that way is bizarre, and that it's hard to find out to whom and to what which reply refers.
It must be a lot harder for people who don't know Wiki.
Brion Vibber wrote:
On mar, 2003-01-07 at 09:13, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Current talk pages are extremely unfriendly. I think they should be abandoned and replaced by more "natural" system of posting.
You mean, not a wiki?
I think not.
Agreed. For the reasons Mark Christensen gave.
Brion Vibber wrote:
On mar, 2003-01-07 at 09:13, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Current talk pages are extremely unfriendly. I think they should be abandoned and replaced by more "natural" system of posting.
You mean, not a wiki?
I think not.
I think not, too. I do acknowledge the difficulties that Tomasz identifies. But I think that moving away from wikiness would lead to unpleasant consequences.
--Jimbo
On Mon, Jan 13, 2003 at 09:27:18AM -0800, Jimmy Wales wrote:
Brion Vibber wrote:
On mar, 2003-01-07 at 09:13, Tomasz Wegrzanowski wrote:
Current talk pages are extremely unfriendly. I think they should be abandoned and replaced by more "natural" system of posting.
You mean, not a wiki?
I think not.
I think not, too. I do acknowledge the difficulties that Tomasz identifies. But I think that moving away from wikiness would lead to unpleasant consequences.
Still, I think that we should add "Post a comment" feature, which would append whatever one writes to Talk page, without any edit conflicts and with nicer interface.
My proposal outline (simpelst): * Have a "Post comment" button * That adds a comment you write in a blank edit box, attaches your signature, date, etc. * It also inserts some tag in front, to keep track of "who answered what to whom" * All that is added/inserted into the talk page * The talk page is still wiki-editable * Every comment contains a "Reply"-link (part of said tag) which opens an edit box (see above).
We'd be adding some tree-like structure without losing the wiki way.
Magnus
P.S.: I'm too busy to code something like that in the next few weeks ;-)
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
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