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

[Carcharoth]

On Thu, Jul 30, 2009 at 12:48 AM, Samuel Klein<meta.sj at gmail.com> wrote:
> 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".

Is there a suitable place on-wiki to put a summary of some of the
points in this thread?

Carcharoth