[WikiEN-l] A modest proposal - a recap of resolution-l

[Samuel Klein]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 1:41 PM, Carcharoth<carcharothwp at googlemail.com> wrote:
>>
>> Ironically, wikis are so far the online medium which have done best at
>> long-term conversations: I routinely see talk page conversations where
>> the gaps between one message and another may be a year or three. This
>> is not something I've ever been able to say of email lists, IRC chat,
>> IM, newsgroups, social sites, web aggregators, most every blog...
>
> Probably to do with the stable central point - the page being
> discussed. All the other mediums you mention are transient. New
> articles hardly anyone returns to. Here, the encyclopedia pages are
> (in theory) kept up-to-date.

When there is a namespace set aside for central points, such as
individual topics, wikis do this brilliantly.  But many wiki processes
simply archive without a central point (or have a week-long discussion
which is then frozen, no more discussion to be had).

One aspect of a community facilitation project would be to define a
namespace for issues, which might be moved and renamed over time, but
would not be 'closed' or 'archived' because someone though a
particular proposed implementation was not a good idea. If someone
thought it was an issue to consider, then it is a valid point in the
namespace, and will always be so.  Someone else might come up with a
great resolution to that issue in the future; it might be effectively
merged with other similar issues; it mght be better understood as a
combination of two resolvable issues.

Or it might just remain, with fluctuating priority, as something
intractable yet important-to-someone.

For instance, I was looking for the latest thoughts on the topic of
'How to create notability guidelines for a new category' (since
[[Category:Wikipedia notability guidelines]] is pretty sparse) without
success.

And the a little while before that I wanted to see who else thought G8
shouldn't be used to speedy delete talk pages or subpages with
valuable discussions. I had a specific example that would have
contributed to the idea that talk pages should be preserved... but
there was only a scattering of a dozen discussions across many
different talkpage archives.

A permanent page for each of these issues, perhaps with one or more
self-selected facilitators willing to help incorporate new thoughts
and more towards a long-term resolution, would be interesting.  To
start with, you could seed the issues namespace with the perennial
proposals.  [[WP:PEREN]] does not do these justice; and in short order
a good facilitator could replace each of the "Reason for previous
rejection" statements with a reworded but equally accurate  "Current
compromise or resolution".

SJ