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

[Ray Saintonge]

Steve Summit wrote:
> 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.)
I don't oppose the idea, and would certainly support giving it a chance 
to succeed.  Still I'm sceptical about the outcome.  My first impression 
is that it would become a special variation of the talk page.  That is 
certainly contrary to your theory, but the forces of undiscipline are 
quite likely to overwhelm the theory.

Ec