Ah well, I knew many of these ideas would be controversial!
Thanks for the many replies.
However, I haven't heard anyone comment about changing the
"talk" pages into a threaded discussion group:
A related idea might be to modify the "talk"
system so that it's
more like a bulletin board, with threaded messages and
a clear identification of who made it (click on "reply" to reply
to that item, maybe in a threaded way). That way, any message is
clearly
identified with its REAL author. A side-effect would be that
the attribution would happen automatically (no more
forgetting ~~~~). That way, when people discuss things, they
can't make it appear that someone else made an outrageous/nasty
statement.
(Yes, a "diff" will show reality, but it's hard to go
through
every diff to see what really happened.)
Presumably there's some acceptance of mailing lists, since
we're talking on one...! :-). Are there fewer objections to
this idea?