On Wed, Jul 29, 2009 at 1:41 PM, Carcharoth<carcharot...@googlemail.com> wrote: >> >> Ironically, wikis are so far the online medium which have done best at >> long-term conversations: I routinely see talk page conversations where >> the gaps between one message and another may be a year or three. This >> is not something I've ever been able to say of email lists, IRC chat, >> IM, newsgroups, social sites, web aggregators, most every blog... > > Probably to do with the stable central point - the page being > discussed. All the other mediums you mention are transient. New > articles hardly anyone returns to. Here, the encyclopedia pages are > (in theory) kept up-to-date.
When there is a namespace set aside for central points, such as individual topics, wikis do this brilliantly. But many wiki processes simply archive without a central point (or have a week-long discussion which is then frozen, no more discussion to be had). One aspect of a community facilitation project would be to define a namespace for issues, which might be moved and renamed over time, but would not be 'closed' or 'archived' because someone though a particular proposed implementation was not a good idea. If someone thought it was an issue to consider, then it is a valid point in the namespace, and will always be so. Someone else might come up with a great resolution to that issue in the future; it might be effectively merged with other similar issues; it mght be better understood as a combination of two resolvable issues. Or it might just remain, with fluctuating priority, as something intractable yet important-to-someone. For instance, I was looking for the latest thoughts on the topic of 'How to create notability guidelines for a new category' (since [[Category:Wikipedia notability guidelines]] is pretty sparse) without success. And the a little while before that I wanted to see who else thought G8 shouldn't be used to speedy delete talk pages or subpages with valuable discussions. I had a specific example that would have contributed to the idea that talk pages should be preserved... but there was only a scattering of a dozen discussions across many different talkpage archives. A permanent page for each of these issues, perhaps with one or more self-selected facilitators willing to help incorporate new thoughts and more towards a long-term resolution, would be interesting. To start with, you could seed the issues namespace with the perennial proposals. [[WP:PEREN]] does not do these justice; and in short order a good facilitator could replace each of the "Reason for previous rejection" statements with a reworded but equally accurate "Current compromise or resolution". SJ _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l