So much of the Wiki is becoming meta or
TripleMeta discussion about what should or shouldn't go on a page, or conversations between anonymous contributors with no
HomePage. Perhaps the community might want to consider some form of
MetaChannel for all this.
Standard for this wiki
- Create a new page with the same name with the word "Discussion" appended (MoveThreadModeToDiscussionPage, DiscussionPage, DiscussionVsConsensus)
- Pro: Real easy to do
- Pro: It is what people have been doing for years
- Pro: No coding change
- Pro: Discussion is useful content that should be left around until it is refactored into a document
- Con: Adds more pages (''easily fixed by more editing')
- Con: They never seem to go away after their purpose has been served. (''easily fixed by more editing')
- Con: Usually are rather fuzzy on separation between "thready-discussion" and "meta-discussion"
- Con: Discussion is impossible while the discussion page is being vandalised
There are some
QuickTopic boards relating to this wiki which are effectively meta-channels, and now a
WikiChannel mailing list.
Other ideas
- The Talk namespace, a la WikiPedia
- Con: Needs change to codebase
- Con: Rather large social shift
- Pro: It's rather hard to get blamed for moving meta talk out of a page when there's an accepted namespace for it
- Pro: Makes separation of DocumentMode and ThreadMode very easy
- Caveat: Differentiation between true meta thread, and loosely organized non-meta threadiness is a must. Otherwise, we'll have lots of (well, even more) parallel discussion.
- Double-bar meta separator (SummariesOnTopDiscussionBelow, SeparateThreadsFromContent)
- Con: Double bars didn't work too well for separating summary from discussion in Wiki's history
- Con: Probably hard for the entire community to follow
- Pro: No coding change
- Explicitly temporary meta pages (DeleteMetadiscussion)
- Pro: Real easy to do
- Con: The existing examples of these rarely seem to be temporary (''easily fixed by more editing')
(^- this is a double bar on purpose. It got deleted by a well-intentioned editor. Supporting evidence that the
DoubleBar idea never really caught on.)
I'm going to begin using this
WikiBadge when I see which could benefit from this. This is mainly to get a better sense of just how bad/not bad the problem is. Let it live for a while, if no-one like the tag, it'll be easy enough to do a reverse search later.
Sunir, if you're lurking, I'm especially interested in your thoughts on this, even a cf to an appropriate
MeatballWiki page would give me some good reading.
The fourth option above notes that xDiscussion pages never seem to go away as a con. Is that really a bad thing? It is often quite instructive to follow the course of discussion that led to a
DocumentMode page.
It would depend on whether the discussion is an unrefined form of the document or whether the discussion is just meta on how to structure the document. I can't see much use for the latter.