[Mediawiki-l] Yes! Replace talk pages!

[Lee Daniel Crocker]

On Fri, 2005-06-03 at 20:17 -0500, Muzaffer Ozakca wrote:

> As I said, my goal is not replacing talk pages but give my users a 
> separate forum.

I think replacing talk pages altogether is a much better goal.
Matt's right--there's too much disorganized data out there that
needs to be integrated into something simpler and with better
connections.  The choice of how a user interacts with a
discussion should be decoupled from the choices of what to
discuss and with whom; we should be able to choose a group and
a topic first, then use whatever software we're comfortable with
to participate.

Wiki pages shouldn't have associated talk /pages/, they should
have associated /forums/, where the comments are are stored by date
with proper source ID, so that user's can do things like "show me
all comments from user X, whom I respect", "killfile idiot Z",
"show me comments within this date range", and so on.  These could
also be gatewayed to/from email lists or usenet groups to which
users could subscribe or unsubscribe at will (by adding the forum to
their watchlist, for example).  Maybe even IRC talks could be
integrated somehow.

It would be good to integrate the software, so that it would share
a common feel and flow (i.e., "discuss" button on the page leads to
the forum, the forum had features for including page text to comment
on, and so forth).  I don't think that would be easy with a third
party tool like phpbb; but maybe it could be hacked.

-- 
Lee Daniel Crocker <lee at piclab.com>
<http://creativecommons.org/licenses/publicdomain/>