[Foundation-l] Google Wave and Wikimedia projects

Sat May 30 13:33:19 UTC 2009

On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 9:14 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com>wrote:

> 2009/5/30 Anthony <wikimail at inbox.org>:
> > On Sat, May 30, 2009 at 8:26 AM, Thomas Dalton <thomas.dalton at gmail.com
> >wrote:
> >
> >> I hated the way it didn't seem to
> >> indicate what message you were replying to. For the most part, the
> >> conversation had a linear structure, not a tree one. They would reply
> >> to the last message in the conversation and the reply would have the
> >> same indentation as all the rest of the messages. To me, that makes it
> >> look like a reply to the original message that started the wave.
> >
> >
> > Heh, that's actually one of the memes in Wikipedia (etc.) talk pages that
> I
> > never liked.  Too geeky.
>
> It doesn't have to be indentation, but there should be some clear way
> of denoting what something is in reply to. Indentation is the most
> common method I've seen, it is not restricted to Wikipedia (or even
> wikis in general) by any means.

No, it isn't.  But it does seem to be restricted to geeks and geek websites
(the one outside of Wikipedia that immediately comes to mind is Slashdot).
Even the idea that each message is "in reply to" exactly one previous
message doesn't seem to fit with real world conversations.  Real people
don't think that way or converse that way.

A: "What's your favorite color?"
B: "I like red"
C: "I like green"
D: "Red and green?  Are you nuts?  Blue is the best color of all?"
A: I agree with B, red is definitely the nicest color.
C: But isn't the wavelength of green so much more asthetically pleasing?

How do you form a tree out of that?