Proposal:Better System For Discussions
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- Achieve continued growth in readership
- Focus on quality content
- Increase Participation
- Stabilize and improve the infrastructure
- Encourage Innovation
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Summary
The discussion pages should be better structured and easier to maintain.
Proposal
The discussion should get its own "engine" instead of just being an additional wiki-page. It should rather resemble a bulletin board, where everyone can pin his text. Different posts should be clearly distinguished by their structure and design (a fat line, a box?).
The presentation of things would be made flexible instead of being a static plain text as it is now. At least two ways to represent a discussion: The chronological one, with links to a posts' reference (more or less like in an internet forum) and something more or less as it is now (indent and no real chronological order) but with some more boundaries, so that people cannot "destroy" other peoples posts (but still can split them in order to refer to different aspects of a post). Posts from the same person may be presented in a coherent style (like a different background-color for different people). The user would have the choice how he wants discussions to be represented.
In general the discussion page has to be more customizable, manageable and assessable even if this takes away a fraction of freedom.
Motivation
One point American users rarely know in its whole scope: Europeans think and work sometimes totally different! Have a look at professional support forums in USA and Europe: The USA ones often work as "solve and forget" the Europeans work more in "solve and archive / maintain". You can easily process old information and parallelice very different thoughts when information can flow easily and transparently. These powerful and efficient methods would be an enrichement not only inside Europe.
Key Questions
How to make it fit for most of all wikipedia users?
Potential Costs
Would probably be expensive as building just another bulletin board software. But I bet there is enough open source knowledge out there to solve that... A quantitiy of dollars? I don't know. I won't be able to pay for it anyways...
References
Community Discussion
Do you have a thought about this proposal? A suggestion? Discuss this proposal by going to Proposal talk:Better System For Discussions.
Want to work on this proposal?
- .. Sign your name here!
- Vibhijain 06:11, 14 May 2011 (UTC)