On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 1:41 PM, Carcharoth<carcharothwp(a)googlemail.com> wrote:
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...
Probably to do with the stable central point - the page being
discussed. All the other mediums you mention are transient. New
articles hardly anyone returns to. Here, the encyclopedia pages are
(in theory) kept up-to-date.
When there is a namespace set aside for central points, such as
individual topics, wikis do this brilliantly. But many wiki processes
simply archive without a central point (or have a week-long discussion
which is then frozen, no more discussion to be had).
One aspect of a community facilitation project would be to define a
namespace for issues, which might be moved and renamed over time, but
would not be 'closed' or 'archived' because someone though a
particular proposed implementation was not a good idea. If someone
thought it was an issue to consider, then it is a valid point in the
namespace, and will always be so. Someone else might come up with a
great resolution to that issue in the future; it might be effectively
merged with other similar issues; it mght be better understood as a
combination of two resolvable issues.
Or it might just remain, with fluctuating priority, as something
intractable yet important-to-someone.
For instance, I was looking for the latest thoughts on the topic of
'How to create notability guidelines for a new category' (since
[[Category:Wikipedia notability guidelines]] is pretty sparse) without
success.
And the a little while before that I wanted to see who else thought G8
shouldn't be used to speedy delete talk pages or subpages with
valuable discussions. I had a specific example that would have
contributed to the idea that talk pages should be preserved... but
there was only a scattering of a dozen discussions across many
different talkpage archives.
A permanent page for each of these issues, perhaps with one or more
self-selected facilitators willing to help incorporate new thoughts
and more towards a long-term resolution, would be interesting. To
start with, you could seed the issues namespace with the perennial
proposals. [[WP:PEREN]] does not do these justice; and in short order
a good facilitator could replace each of the "Reason for previous
rejection" statements with a reworded but equally accurate "Current
compromise or resolution".
SJ