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

[Gwern Branwen]

On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 1:53 PM, stevertigo<stvrtg at gmail.com> wrote:
> On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 10:31 AM, Gwern Branwen<gwern0 at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Email lists have the attention span of ferrets on crack; if we're
>> looking for long-term discussions, MLs are the worst model we could
>> pick, which is another strike against this proposal.
>
> And yet you write to one or more regularly,

I usually only write about transient events which I think will
interest this particular small group of hardcore/oldtimer Wikipedians;
the only other forums I could think of to reach this same group is the
Signpost, and that's a one-way street.

> and while your name itself
> may not be cited, your term "ferrets on crack" will no doubt be reused
> here until the end of wiki-time.

I'm skeptical; 'ferrets on crack' is an old phrase, and I think I've
used it here before without anyone picking up on it. I'd suggest that
we check back in a year or two to see who was right, but there's the
whole memory-hole problem with MLs... Oh the ironing!

>> 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...
>
> Keep in mind that "wiki" is just a format, with all the backend
> required, for editing documents online. It's fast becoming as
> ubiquitous as paper someday will once have been, and thus our entire
> project is sort of stuck with a name that in a few years will have the
> same sense of distinction as 'paperpedia,' or 'pulpedia'.

Generic - like the _Encyclopédie_?

> Anyway, back to the point, wikis are great for documents - not
> conversations. There are of course ideas out there now for ways to
> make wiki pages more liquid and perhaps even making its individual
> elements atomic and rankable - such as to be suitable for discussions.
> And there are also ideas about making traditionally non-wiki concepts
> like email more openly editable - waves comes to mind, along with
> other CMSes that integrate wiki. 'Someday all websites will be wiki?'
> - Sure, but when that happens we won't need to to call them wikis
> anymore.
>
> -Stevertigo

Yes, the best way forward is probably to improve talk pages. They've
already proven that they can go the distance; so 'all' that's needed
is to make them more user-friendly and longterm-watchable without
compromising their longevity.

Web forums and Reddit pages are a good example of this: in theory they
should work just as fine as talk pages, since they need not ever
close, and forum threads can be 'stickied' to make them as permanently
prominent as a WP article. Yet, in practice, they don't work so well.
I attribute this to a overly cluttered UI, generally poor search, and
their linear presentation.

I'm actually not too enthused about Google Wave for this purpose.
Watching the demo, the entire thing seems optimized for short waves
with minimal nesting. The history scroll thing is no good for, say,
Talk:Jesus, and the comment boxes are all very small and so discourage
any in-depth discussion.

-- 
gwern