On 31/10/05, Uwe Brauer <oub(a)mat.ucm.es> wrote:
One of the inconvenience of the discussion page in
wikipedia is the
fact that does not have a mail-client type of interface/display. That
is neither there is a email-summary type of display, nor a display
which would allow to display the threads easily.
Are there any plans to include such a feature.
This has been discussed before (I haven't any links to hand, but the
usual Googling with "site:mail.wikipedia.org" should turn things up
from these lists), but the central problem is that the current setup
has no internal representation of a single thread, let alone a single
comment, only of a whole page (roughly equivalent to a forum, or a
mailbox). The individual threads could potentially be interpretted out
by looking at headers, though these aren't used entirely consistently,
but it would require quite complex and unreliable pattern matching to
separate what humans can easily see as the individual comments.
Furthermore, this is in some ways an *advantage* - all the
old-fashioned wiki processes, like refactoring and so on, can take
place on the discussion page, unrestricted by structure imposed by the
software. One intriguing compromise was the "LiquidThreads" proposal,
at
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/LiquidThreads, but I'd consider it
more of an "idea" than a "planned feature"...
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]