[Mediawiki-l] Yes! Replace talk pages!

[Carlton B]

I agree with this.   I have more thoughts on the matter than I have time to
write at this exact moment.   The group edit paradigm is good for articles,
but bad for discussion.   In articles, the integrity of the individual's
voice is secondary except to isolate vandalism.   In discussions, the
integrity of the individual's voice is the whole point.

On casual inspection, Wikimedia seems to do OK in preserving the
individual's voice on the talk pages... but that's just casual inspection.
If participants are actively monitoring their own words for edits, they can
enforce the integrity of their own words, but if not, it's open to
misrepresentation.   You can't really know that without inspecting every
diff of the talk page.  That's too much to demand of a user and does not
encourage discussion.   Thus, discussions should be threaded.

If I had infinite time to put into MW, I might try something like mapping
each category to a forum, and each MW article name to a thread title.   If
they chose, users could view MW as a forum skin, seeing only the talk pages
and doing nothing but "talking" if they choose.   This would encourage
non-adversarial discussion, which I think would be a better method of
information discovery than the currently prevalent adversarial mode.

> -----Original Message-----
> From: mediawiki-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org
> [mailto:mediawiki-l-bounces at Wikimedia.org]On Behalf Of Lee Daniel
> Crocker
> Sent: Saturday, June 04, 2005 11:32 AM
> To: MediaWiki announcements and site admin list
> Subject: [Mediawiki-l] Yes! Replace talk pages!
>
>
> 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/>
>
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