Ryan Lane wrote: That's the same thing. Or it comes down to the same thing, namely a strong objection to anyone editing one's comments. As you said, it's a belief -- not an argument. Primarily I want for people to be able to edit out offensive remarks and personal attacks. The only people who would object to this being done would be the people who would make such remarks and then scream blue murder when they're removed. Clearly we can live without them. Secondarily I want to be able to fix spellings, in the faint hope that it will help some people learn better spelling. Again, the only people who would object to this would be people who can't spell and are therefore unsuitable for writing an encyclopedia anyway. I've heard many reasons for maliciously changing an article. Yet articles on Wikipedia tend to get better. Interesting, innit? No, the purpose of this was to test your reaction. You fell right for it exactly the way I expected: you picked up only on the emotional side of the paragraph (taking it as an insult) and responded only to that. You didn't address any of what it actually *says*; in particular, you haven't answered my question. Are you a lawyer? And this highlights what I mean: you (and many other people) only object to being able to edit comments because it somehow "feels" wrong. You can't really say why it *is* wrong. You just think that it will "somehow" change the comment "and hence" the entire discussion, "and therefore" it must not be done. Same with the malice argument: people could edit comments maliciously OMG that's bad "and thus" the whole idea is really bad!... Get my drift? In order for the discussion to be a community-written piece, the community must be able to intervene when something (or someone) in the discussion is (or becomes) disruptive. Not letting people edit comments paves the way to flamewars, trolling and (dare I say it) just another clone of Usenet. Notice how you haven't answered my question again? What I meant was, a _good implementation_ won't get done. MediaWiki has been written, yes, but it's a rather bad implementation. Timwi

Thank you Ivan for a voice of reason. Your statements seem perfectly accurate. The gains made by editable comments are minor: The community can collaboratively prevent flamewars and edit spelling. The losses are major: The community could prevent speech that they deem offensive, which is an violation of free speech in general, (especially since people often consider differing viewpoints "offensive" and would edit them out) and people would not have their comments represented as written, which makes the discussion difficult to follow at best and pointless at worst. To say exactly why it IS wrong that I edit other people's comments: This has as much to do with free speech as the concept of wikis in general. (Go read "Free Software, Free Society" for a good chunk of Stallman on the issue of opinion writing.) The purpose of an encyclopedia is to be informative about specific topics, hopefully in a NPOV manner as far as this is possible. Because of this goal, the wiki structure is amazing--the wiki structure fulfills the goal through collaboration. A message board, comment thread, or whatever you want to call it, does NOT have this purpose. The purpose is to discuss something. More fundamentally, the purpose of *my comment* is to represent *my opinion*, which is not subject to the bounds of an encyclopedia article. Therefore, my comment as posted fulfills this goal in a way directly proportional to my ability to express myself. Assuming I can express myself sufficiently to reflect my thoughts, then my comment *as posted* fulfills the purpose of a comment 100%. Editing of any fashion only harms the effectiveness of my comment--it makes it fulfill less of its purpose, whereas editing an encyclopedia article improves the effectiveness thereof. That is why comments DO "belong" to their authors, not in a sense of ownership per se, (they belong to the community for reading and to inform the community about the poster's opinion) but because any changes to those comments by others defeat the philosophical purpose of a comment/threaded discussion. Thanks for reading. No invective responses, please. Take care, -- Christian Sieber Brigham Young University Ivan Krstic wrote:

On 02/11/05, Jan-Paul Köster <Jan-Paul(a)jpkoester.de> wrote: Well, the problem is, you can't have a page which is both "completely refactorable" and consists of comments which can be labelled automatically by the software. Either, as currently, pages are essentially atomic to the software (it can't "see" individual comments, just lots of versions of the whole page), or the concept of "a comment" is given significance to the software, and edits to it can be tracked, locked, or whatever. The challenge, surely, is to come up with a compromise between these two positions - just making individual comments into wiki pages is not enough, because you can't, in general, refactor one comment. -- Rowan Collins BSc [IMSoP]

Jan-Paul Köster wrote: I am sorry to say that I have seen misrepresentations occur on several occasions. Problematic is that when you start adding comments like I do now in this post, you are likely to have follow up reactions and as a consequence you may not appreciate what was said later in the Wiki format. Certainly when a comment is over several paragraphs this is often seen. The worst case of splitting is when paragraphs are split up resulting in something that that can really be badly read. Asking people to refrain from doing this resulted in the statement that it is allowed by the GFDL and that it is old style Internet working method (as if this is an excuse). I do not have opinion as to what to do differently. With technical solutions you do not take away the core problem. Behaviour acceptable to some is not acceptable to others. I think we do a reasonable job at keeping things reasonable. By raising the threshold for nuisance you only get worse nuisance.. I think we are fortunate that things are as good as they are. So to express my opinion.. let's be conservative :) Thanks, GerardM

On 11/2/05, Gregory Maxwell <gmaxwell(a)gmail.com> wrote: I wouldn't mind seeing the timestamp on signatures be a diff link , actually: makes it easy to see what was originally posted and doesn't add more to the standard sig. -Kat [[en:User:Mindspillage]] -- "There was a point to this story, but it has temporarily escaped the chronicler's mind." --Douglas Adams

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Moin, On Wednesday 02 November 2005 20:46, Timwi wrote: If this (misrepresenting what I wrote) happens only once to *my* comments, it is a significant problem for me. Up to the point where I would stop posting comments *at all* until the website makes sure that my comments are not edited and still show my signature. There is a reason I digitally sign all emails :-) Best wishes, Tels - -- Signed on Thu Nov 3 18:37:25 2005 with key 0x93B84C15. Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/ PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email. "I intend to live forever, or die trying." -- Groucho Marx

Of course you are always free to not participate in any discussion. I don't see any problem with that.

Timwi <timwi@...> writes: You know... I don't even understand why we are arguing over such a mundane thing. There isn't any reason why we can't have an option in the code allowing admins to choose whether a wiki allows editing of comments or not. Shouldn't it be the decision of the users, or community leaders, whether they would want comments edited or not? Put it up to a vote if this piece of software is ever written. Anyway, not everyone using this software is wikipedia. I know the software is aimed at wikipedia, but there are many pieces of the software that were added by those who use the software internally. I use mediawiki internally, and I (and my users) would prefer if their comments were not editable. Disallowing the feature just because it goes against your views is holding back functionality from those who could truly use it. Ryan Lane

-----BEGIN PGP SIGNED MESSAGE----- Moin, On Wednesday 02 November 2005 22:54, Timwi wrote: But I still get the idea that we will not even have the option to lock comments because some don't want this at all. :-( Best wishes, Tels - -- Signed on Thu Nov 3 18:40:02 2005 with key 0x93B84C15. Visit my photo gallery at http://bloodgate.com/photos/ PGP key on http://bloodgate.com/tels.asc or per email. "Eat, eat, eat, eat the delicious sandwich!" -- Elan the Bard (Order of the Stick)

Hello When I wrote about the lack of threading capabilities in the WikiPedia discussion page, I had only experience with relative low frequented discussions pages, for which the Wikipedia software was uncomfortable but still ok. However now I am on discussion page with a lot of hot debated contributions. That is a sort of nightmare, since a lot of people are editing that page at the same time, try to chance the outline and as a result contributions get either malformed or changed or even deleted in short it is a PITA. So I would like to know. - is it possible to use for example parts of the software of the moodle project http://moodle.org. That is open software for course management. Every course has its own, mailing list like, discussion page. Now the parallels to wikipedia seem obvious course=article. However in reality can that software be used for wikipedia? - Would it be possible that instead of providing a link to a discussion page, provide a link to a corresponding *newsgroup*. That is every article page should have its newsgroup (or mailing list if that would be easier.) Regards Uwe Brauer

&lt;brion(a)pobox.com&gt; writes: Brion> Uwe Brauer wrote: Brion> I think having several million mailing lists or newsgroups Brion> would not be very nice. :) I doubt it would be that many which would be really used frequently. It might come down to several thousands (for each language I must add) Why not? Would it really slow down anything? Any mailinglist/newgroups are so much more convenient for discussions Uwe

&lt;gmaxwell(a)gmail.com&gt; writes: Gregory> Part of the point is that all pages should have a single Gregory> talk area available so that users have a nice consistent Gregory> way to discuss the article. Many pages talks are used Gregory> infrequently but they are still used.... a non-wiki talk Gregory> page would just become a spam trap as users couldn't Gregory> remove spam as they do today. Personally I don't find Gregory> mailinglists or newsgroups any more convenient, and I Gregory> think the wiki editing practice is much needed by our Gregory> users. Oops you have not been on wiki-discussion pages say of size 0.2 M, which frequent comments. Just to add a comment to check whether I have used the wikipedia syntax correctly is very time consuming (especially if the connection is slow). - I can write this reply change its format indenting and the like at will, - and have not to bother whether my reply gets edited - and the list offer me a reasonable threading such that I can find my posting and the relevant answers in an instant. And these points you don't find convenient? Uwe Brauer

&lt;gmaxwell(a)gmail.com&gt; writes: Gregory> Sure I've been on large talk pages, thought I generally Gregory> archive off the inactive sections once they get that Gregory> large! Problem is that sometimes so called inactive sections will get comments and answers after a while, since it does not make to much sense to add that comments in new sections Gregory> You can change the indenting on a wikipage, and someone Gregory> walking into a discussion later doesn't need to waste Gregory> their time seeing 100x duplication of text as people quote Gregory> it since there is only one topmost copy. Yeah but that chance of indent, adding : is a sort of PITA, because it is *not* WYSIWYG (as in emails/newsgroups). As for (mis)quotes in mailing lists it depends what people quote, a lot just let the text stay end add text which has no reference to the quote (kill-paragraph is you friend in emacs/xemacs for those things) Gregory> Sorry, but the communities need to remove spam and to Gregory> refactor and otherwise focus conversations trumps your Gregory> paranoia about your comments being edited. _paranoia_ ??? It happened to me 3 times, including once the reply got lost and could not be recovered. (Spam in say gmane seems not a huge problem to me) Gregory> If we distrust our fellow editors so much that we must Gregory> worry about them editing our comments on a system that Gregory> preserves complete revision history, then we have already Gregory> lost and should just give up. It has not necessarily be done by bad intention. The wikipage I am referring to suffers from editing by the participants (I am not talking about vandalism here) Gregory> Whats wrong with searching for your signature or reading Gregory> in diff mode? It is simply far less convenient than a mailing list newgroup thread Gregory> I don't think any of them are sufficiently compelling or Gregory> unachievable with the existing behavior that a change Gregory> would be justified. So the last and most annoying of all the points I mentioned, is the speed. - I write that reply, run the spell checker (hopefully successfully) and sent it away. - In the wikipedia discussion page, I would have to run several times the preview, before saving the page and if the connection is real slow. Roughly wikipedia discussions page are around 4 times slower before the relevant contribution is digested.

Timwi> There's nothing stopping you from writing a WYSIWYG editor Timwi> for Wiki mark-up. :-) Well the lack of sufficiently technical abilities would qualify as a reason, I think. Timwi> What happened to you three times? That a comment of yours Timwi> was edited? That is to be expected, and perfectly Timwi> alright. That it was edited maliciously and nobody reverted Timwi> it? That's hard to believe. Twice the format was changed, once it was lost and could not be found nor reverted believe me. I thought one of the wiki commitments is: thou shalt not chance thy content no thy format of thy neighbour Timwi> This is because friendly list administrators clean out the Timwi> spam behind the scenes so you don't have to. Just because Timwi> you can't see it doesn't mean it doesn't exist ;-) And that would be difficult to implement? Another idea: - would it be possible to have the discussion page, without the wiki makeup language. While this formating is nice for reading and writing articles, I find that checking whether the format of my contribution is correct is a real time consumer. And a question: - is it possible that a certain paragraph starts each line with the same prefix, like but I say bla bla Uwe Brauer

Firstly, I am not aware of any ad hominem attacks from me. Since the definition of ad hominem attack is vague, though, it is easily possible that people mistake my argumentation for such. As for strawman arguments, I know they are notoriously difficult to spot, so I cannot claim I haven't made any. On the other hand, no-one has pointed out any to me. As for the second part, who is the "you" you are referring to? If it's me, the answer is: I don't, and I never did. I feel misunderstood by about half of the participants in this discussion. Timwi

Christopher Granade wrote: I've read it again and again and I don't see anything confrontational or aggressive about it. Either way, I never mean to be confrontational or aggressive, but I make a point of arguing logically and rationally. It tends to yield more meaningful conclusions than "hmm this doesn't feel right let's not do it", much less "hmm this doesn't feel right so let's prohibit it for everyone". If you misinterpret that as aggression or confrontationalism, then I can only advise you to get to know me better. If you felt attacked because you count yourself as one of the people whose attitude I referred to as "stupidity", then I apologise, but this must mean that you agree that you "just assume that you "own" your comments by default, and complain about any form of "tinkering" even when it's perfectly legitimate if you thought about it for only a second". Surely you can't agree with me that any intelligent thinking being would find that kind of behaviour reasonable? This sounds like you think that all of your comments are perfect and never need any form of improvement. This is hardly plausible: everyone sometimes makes a comment which inadvertantly ticks someone off (like I did, apparently; I would have liked for someone to be able to replace the word "stupidity" with "behaviour" or anything that runs a lower risk of offending someone); and everyone sometimes makes lesser mistakes (e.g. half of a comment is off-topic; a "not" was forgotten, or inserted where it was obviously not intended; accidentally referring to the wrong user or linking to the wrong diff when making an accusation, etc. etc. etc.). There needs to be a way for other people to correct these problems, or else (1) threads will too easily drift off-topic; (2) misunderstandings will exacerbate and get out of control; (3) flamewars and trolling will thrive. No, but every single comment that was edited by someone else should bear a small but noticeable disclaimer to that effect. (I was going to insert some extra polemics here about something being obvious, but I've realised that this kind of bickering is not going to get us anywhere.) Timwi