Who are you to decide what is objectionable, or
unnecessarily long,
especially in someone's opinion based comment?
Strawman argument: I didn't say I "decide" anything. If anyone can edit,
anyone can revert; the "decision" is ultimately that of the community,
not of any individual. The purpose of the comment is (and will always
be) to reflect a given user's opinion, and the community will ensure
this will be met.
On the contrary, who are you to decide that nobody should be allowed to
edit something, ESPECIALLY in a system where you are perfectly free to
simply NOT SUBMIT whatever it is you don't want edited? We already have
mailing lists where you can publish stuff that you don't want edited.
This is EXACTLY what a lot of people are talking about
when they
dislike the idea of someone editing their comments.
And the fact that it is a fallacy is EXACTLY what I'm talking about when
I dislike the idea of giving in to it.
Just because something is status quo doesn't mean
that it is working.
Nor does it mean that it is _not_ working. I see very little of the
problems you have described, and even the problems that you have
described are false dilemmas, i.e. they can perfectly well be addressed
without preventing anyone from editing something. Example:
99% of the time, people who are reading the discussion
section will
NOT check the history to see if what someone said is really what
someone said.
Right, so it needs to be made easier to check this, and/or there needs
to be some sort of visual indication that there is a chance that it
might not be what someone said. Both is addressed by my suggestion of
adding a little "This comment was last edited by <username>
<date/time>"
with a link to a diff between the comment's original author's latest
revision and the current revision. It surely does not mean it's
necessary to make editing of any comment impossible.
I believe the proposed idea is quite a good balance
between the
current model, and a traditional forum/thread style model.
The proposed idea *is* a traditional forum/thread style model, with only
two additional features (users can allow other users to edit their
comments, and the concept of "channels"). It is to the wiki philosophy
like Everything2 is to Wikipedia.
Ideologically, it's kind of like allowing people to submit articles and
then keep them protected so only they can edit them. You're going to
tell me that it's not the same thing because comments express a person's
opinion, but this is why I added the word "ideologically". If it was
just about letting people's paranoia free reign, then we could as well
just use a box-standard web forum. In fact, it would already be possible
_theoretically_ to move all discussions to a mailing list and use the
Talk namespace only for the summaries/refactorings. Why don't we do
this? Because IT'S NOT WIKI.
I think your objection to a new system is conservatism
at its best.
It would be conservatism if I was an avid Talk-page participant. However
you will notice that I am actually quite a bit more active on the
mailing lists than the Talk pages.
The new model could offer quite a bit of benefit.
You have not convinced me of such a "benefit" of making it completely
impossible to edit some comments. You have shown some drawbacks of the
current system, but as I said, concluding from it that editing needs to
be made impossible is a false-dilemma fallacy.
Timwi