I don't know how many people here remember their first discussion on WP, but I do. Probably because it was less than 6 months ago. :)
My first impression was "you have got to be kidding me". I was annoyed I had to learn a new markup dialect, but that didn't deter me. Since I had some experience with wiki software when it was still cool about a decade ago, I chalked it up to the Weltanschauung that a wiki can do almost anything. I've always thought that there is a clause missing from this mindset: "and 99% of that it does poorly". I think that discussions easily find themselves in that 99%. But I wonder if there is a way that Flow can sit on top of wiki markup; many document oriented databases back discussion software, so why can't we reuse all the work done in formatting, version, and handling conflicts for discussions? Is it possible that discussions can be implemented without changing the data layer at all?
FWIW, I signed my first comment by hand. I missed the comments about sigs in the wikitext editor interface. If it weren't for my family situation, I'm pretty sure I would have bailed. In any case, it was much easier to engage at WO, and that was partly- but not mostly- due to the fact that they run discussion software over there.
,Wil
On Mon, Sep 8, 2014 at 7:24 AM, Marc A. Pelletier marc@uberbox.org wrote:
On 09/08/2014 10:18 AM, Risker wrote:
The most obvious one is automatic signing of comments, and it is something that we have technically been able to impose for years; sinebot didn't come into existence in a vacuum.
I suppose that's a philosophical divergence between us then - that sinebot even needs to exist to me is demonstration that the system is broken.
You say that discussion isn't all that much harder than editing content. Even if I agreed with that (and I do not, edit conflicts in articles are much rarer than on talk pages - and usually easier to sort out), that's not a *good* thing!
Participating in discussion should be much, *much* easier than editing articles: encouraging newbies to seek help and participate in the community *before* diving in anything but trivial article edits would be an immensely powerful retention tool!
(Which isn't to say that editing articles doesn't *also* need a lot of help - but that's a different project).
-- Marc
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