Talk media

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This page is brought up in response to the email thread from a japanese wikipedian who revealed that many japanese are using offsite methods to conduct talks:

http://www.wikipedia.org/pipermail/wikipedia-l/2003-May/thread.html#start starting with email entitiled: [Wikipedia-l] use of a bot (long) Tomos at Wikipedia

Contents

[edit] It is essential that we try out all talk media in order to discuss talk media itself.

The simple ideology of Wikitax stresses the importance of this also: Most users learn blog, crit or news technology first and only later come here and adapt to wiki methods. The more similar conventions in the wikitext standard are to those in talk media, the better.

[edit] It is advised that you mainly add ideas here, and try to keep this concise, issue based (not talk based SO do disputes elsewhere), and do good summaries of these issues

[edit] So

The email above shows that language issues need to be addressed, and along with this, its probably good to address the innefficiency (perceived? threatening?) of the two current talk media that wikipedia offers:

  • mailing lists (see link above)
  • talk pages.

It has been suggested that a very i18n robust project phpbb.com/phpBB be tried out. This has been met with criticism because of its performance hit.

Anyway, this page is here for us to help identify the issues that have been brought up regarding the above email. The goal is to find out what we *need* to do, and if by doing that , it becomes unignorable that other things really ought to be done because its just time....or maybe it isnt.


[edit] What needs to be done to make wikipedia's talk media viable for the entire community:

  • how to make it i18n friendly (input from original complaintant to go here).


[edit] What could also be done:

  • create some type of structure within the chat system
  • create better notification and logging within the chat system.
  • create a way to markup a wikipage to link to a specific point in a talk page (or whatever new talk media is adopted), its nicer to see a cute little symbol, than have people the option to [[Talk:whatever | Talk about this topic just mentioned here]] OR [[Talk:whatever | Talk about said topic before menioned]].
    • whether to make this symbol (and its associated wiki markup) for only that articles talk page, or for all and any
  • the weblink on every email sent showing its actual location on the www archive of the mailing list.

A portion of the above issues are accomplished clearly in a project like http://phpbb.com/phpBB, which also has excellent i18n support.


  • However, maybe something as simple as some new markup for talk media, and some new parsing could be done ala: http://zesty.ca/criticons/


[edit] Corollary issues:

  • bbs or some threaded system vs our current talk media( talk_page,mailman)
    • disallows people from reorganizing talks (which ought to displayed as they happened), by loading the entire discussion (or in page views)
    • it discourages copious recopying of text ( so that each message can stand on its own (like email encourages). However, this could be hacked into mailman's webview to look like this google-groups example
    • you can change the title of your little response without worrying at all about its position within the thread. This increases efficiency greatly.
  • mailman is file based, and not DB based, and hence is very efficient. It might make sense to hack some of the crit markup (zesty link) ability into that, instead of into wikipedia's talk pages.
  • Technically, phpbb already does email notification (lets users watch chosen topics via email), which can be hacked up to allow for email responding, thus giving you a completely email and webbased hybrid.
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