On 01/11/05, Christopher E. Granade <cgranade(a)greens.org> wrote:
I think what you allude to in wikimode discussion
forums could be solved
by establishing a Scratch: namespace that mirrors the global namespace
(e.g.: Scratch:Template:NPOV) that is not considered to be "finished."
During development of new formats, or extensive editing, provisional
changes could be placed under Scratch, and such suggestions could be
referenced from LiquidThreads.
Well, my initial reaction to this was "Yuk!" - the whole wiki is
supposed to be subject to "extensive editting". Even by having a
separate discussion namespace, we've rather removed the incentive to
refactor discussions into content or summaries, to our own detriment.
Splitting it even further into mostly-stable articles, hard-structured
discussions, and unstructured "scratch buffers" would be like having
an open-access CMS-cum-wiki, a forum system, and a traditional wiki
operating in parallel, which all seems rather stifling. I know that's
not what you were suggesting, but it's a kind of worst-case scenario
of going down that path.
OTOH, I guess there is some kind of logic to saying that if we're
going to force discussion pages to act like classical discussions, we
need somewhere else to put their other purposes - and it's true that
people already use them as "scratch". I just think we need to be
careful in making things too structured, lest we lose the immediacy
that is the whole point of being a wiki in the first place.
--
Rowan Collins BSc
[IMSoP]