On 23 Jul 2003, Erik Moeller wrote:
Alright, that's a killer argument against them. Gone are the lines.
Hurray! :)
Maybe we can just agree to phase out unnecessary formatting -- lots of articles use bold for headlines, <font...> for table headers etc. This confuses the "edit section" feature, which (correctly) is not triggered on these instructions.
Yes, phasing out unnecessary formatting sounds like a good idea.
Not easy enough. A couple of days ago someone edited their *own* user talk page to comment on a completely unrelated article. I asked them what page they were referring to, and they *emailed* me in response
Okay, I hadn't taken into account the fact that people might overlook or fail to understand the "Discuss this page" link. But then again, if they couldn't even get to the right talk page, they wouldn't be able to access any new features on that talk page either... So I'm not sure that *anything* can be done for people in the position of your unfortunate correspondent!
Where were you anyway in the large discussion about whether we should switch the entire discussion system to a BBS? I almost single-handedly defended the wiki way in that discussion. If I hadn't done so, someone might have set up a BBS already by now.
I must admit I wasn't paying much attention. I thought that was just about replacing the mailing lists, and I thought the idea was bad enough that it would be dismissed by everyone, so I pretty much ignored the thread. I didn't realise it was only you doing most of the dismissing. Sorry about that...
That's silly, because the people who would benefit from the feature could not help in the archiving process anyway -- they could not edit the page at all! At least now they can say "Post a comment"->"Someone needs to archive this talk page. I can't edit the whole page anymore."
Well, that's why I suggested a feature for making archiving easier. It's an alternative way of solving the same problem, but the end result is that the page is shorter, rather than longer. I think that would be preferable.
Furthermore, if eventually it becomes reasonably possible to participate in 100K discussions because the interface allows it (by editing sections, replying to individual comments and appending new comments at the bottom), what exactly is the problem? We're not Microsoft -- we don't need to hardcode the 32K limit.
Well, people might find it annoying to have to wait for a 100K page to load up, and then scroll through it to find the section they want to contribute to.
So lang as we don't end up with dumb automatic archives like [[/Archive 1]], that's fine with me. However, it astonishes me that someone who whines^Wcomplains^Wtalks as much about "simplicity" would propose a feature that would substantially complicate the editing process.
I'm just here to be as awkward as possible. ;) Well, no, I only suggested the archiving idea because it would overcome the problem of people not being able to edit long pages by giving them a mechanism to shorten them. It's true that your proposal would also work, but I think that keeping pages short is generally a good practice, and that making it easier to add to long pages will discourage people from doing that. So maybe I'm saying that editing should be made complicated for people who want to add to long pages, so that they are encouraged to shorten them. :)
Oh, I know, we could just have an "Archive this section" link. When you click on it, ping! the whole section in [[Talk:Joe Bloggs]] headed "Joe Bloggs and New Imperialism" is replaced by the line, "Discussion moved to [[Talk:Joe Bloggs/Joe Bloggs and New Imperialism]]", and that new page is created at the same time. I think that would be as easy to use as your features, and although it would complicate the user interface (which I am generally opposed to) it would simplify talk pages in the sense that they would end up free of clutter in the form of out-of-date discussions.
You are completely mistaken in your belief that wiki-editing discussions is "simple". It's complex and needs to be made easier, if we want to keep this method of discussing at all. Wading through 20 comments in a small edit window just to find the one you want to reply to is not simple, it is time-consuming.
Oh all right, you've convinced me. Maybe reforming how the talk pages work is a good idea after all. But I'm not convinced that a feature to add new sections should be one of those reforms. Most additions to talk pages will be to ongoing discussions anyway, so the feature would rarely need to be used. Before you decided to remove all criticism of your feature from [[m:Layout vote]], Bdesham suggested that it would encourage people to ignore threading, which sounds a good argument to me.
Oliver
+-------------------------------------------+ | Oliver Pereira | | Dept. of Electronics and Computer Science | | University of Southampton | | omp199@ecs.soton.ac.uk | +-------------------------------------------+