[Mediawiki-l] Threaded discussion pages?

[Dan Bolser]

On 14/08/07, Erik Moeller <erik at wikimedia.org> wrote:
> On 8/14/07, Frederik Dohr <fdg001 at gmx.net> wrote:
> > Well, there's the LiquidThreads project:
> >      http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/Extension:LiquidThreads
> > However, that page doesn't contain any info on the current status - but
> > I think it's still actively in development. Not sure about an ETA
> > though; Rob or Brion probably know more about that.
>
> It's under active development with funding from COL.org and Wikia.com.
> There's a demo at
>
> http://wikixp.org/lqt/index.php/Main_Page
>
> (try any talk page). There's still lots of work to do but we're making
> good progress & keeping up with SVN trunk.


That is very nice, but it's clearly an attempt to crunje MW into
something resembling a discussion forum. Given that the concept,
requirements and implementation of discussion forums are essentially
solved problems, why is it necessary to attempt to re-develop them
all? I can see that there are a lot of advantages to this project, and
not least it looks like fun. But, when it comes to discussions,
existing discussion forum tools are already more or less perfect.

<Insert lengthy discussion of the merits of making discussion forums
more MediaWiki-like here>


My idea is to have MW for articles, and flip to an instance of
something like PHPBB for the discussion tab, Allowing users to start
new threads, comment on existing threads, etc. etc. Some discussion of
this kind of integration was going on on the punBB forums. I wonder if
anything similar is being suggested elsewhere?


Thanks for the pointers,

Dan.