[WikiEN-l] What to do about our writing quality?

[Steve Summit]

Ec wrote:
> Abd ul-Rahman Lomax wrote:
>> There is somewhere a recommendation that Talk be refactored. Right 
>> now, what I see, everywhere I've looked, is that Talk pages are 
>> simply archived. And then the same debates occur over and over...
>
> Refactoring talk pages is an old notion that was already there when I 
> became involved in early 2002.  I tried it then on a couple of 
> occasions, and found it to be an incredibly difficult task.

A "refactor" that I've long thought could be useful would be
if every article (potentially) had, along with its Talk page,
a Rationale page.  The Rationale page would explain, in as much
details as was necessary, why the article is written as it is,
why it says the things it says, and why it does not say the things
it does not say.  The Rationale would evolve and change over time,
just like the article.  The Rationale would *not* grow inexorably
over time; it would not need archiving as talk pages do.
(It might have an interesting history, just as articles do.)

In particular, the Rationale would not be a talk page; it would
not have individual, ~~~~-signed entries.  It would, potentially,
be as carefully written (rewritten and polished) as the article
itself.  It would, in a sense, be a mirror of the article, but
targeted at editors rather than readers.

Some articles are already doing this sort of thing in an ad-hoc
way, often using subpages of the talk page.  (I'm thinking, for
example, of [[Talk:Muhammad]] and its subpage [[Talk:Muhammad/images]],
although that subpage is a topic-specific talk page, not a
Rationale as I've described here.)