Jimbo-
Erik Moeller wrote:
> 2) Having talk pages handle comments thread-style automatically while
> retaining wiki-form would be desirable.
Can you explain what you mean by this? What do you
mean by "retaining
wiki-form"?
One thing that I like about the current talk pages is
that they are
wiki pages, so that they can be refactored from time to time. It is
true that we don't really do much refactoring, and that it's a huge
social taboo to edit other people's comments during a discussion, but
there's something important, I think, about the mutual trust that's
built up when we *can* screw with each other's remarks, but *don't*.
See the referenced URLs; basically, having an auto-inserted "reply to
this" link after each comment that takes you to a blank editing window
whose contents are inserted in indented form after the comment you reply
to. You could still choose to use "Edit this page" instead, but "reply to
this" would be a convenience, because you would not have to scroll to the
proper place in the wikitext and would not have to sign your comment.
Similarly, a "post a comment" link should be on each talk page, which
takes you to a blank editing form that allows you to write wikitext that
is also auto-signed and appended to the bottom of the page (starting a new
thread). In this case, there should also be a "subject" field, which would
automatically be translated to a "== foo ==" heading on the page. And for
extra fun, we could have an automatic "archive this thread" link after
each heading :-).
Optimally, in both cases, edit conflicts would be handled in the
background, but this is a more general problem that could be solved with
some smart merging. To do this, we would need some kind of tagging,
visible in the wikisource or not, for comments for the software to
identify them individually. This could perhaps be combined with the
signature marker. If the markers are visible in the wikitext, it would be
possible to break them through malicious editing, but then again, we deal
with this in other situations, so it's probably no big deal.
Regards,
Erik