Personally, I've given up on talk pages. The reason is many of them don't have actual "talk". I see a blue talk link and go there and all that is there is a template "this page is part of wiki project xyz". I'd really like it if that kind of information about a page was somewhere other than "talk".
Sent from my iPhone On Oct 12, 2011, at 1:56, Carcharoth <carcharot...@googlemail.com> wrote: > On Tue, Oct 11, 2011 at 9:05 PM, Gwern Branwen <gwe...@gmail.com> wrote: >> Pondering the utility of talk page edits recently, I've begun to >> wonder: how many of our readers actually look at the talk page as >> well? I know some writers writing articles on Wikipedia have mentioned >> or rhapsodized at length on the interest of the talk pages for >> articles, but they are rare birds and statistically irrelevant. > > <snip long analysis> > >> I suggest that the common practice of 'moving reference/link to the >> Talk page' be named what it really is: a subtle form of deletion. > > Well, only if there is no discussion. I think moving to the talk page > is far better than outright removal. It does at least give editors a > chance to review what has been included and what has been excluded. > And talk pages *should* be for editors and not really for readers. I > frequently use the talk pages to help draft articles and as a place to > put material that I'm not quite sure is ready for inclusion yet. > Putting everything straight into an article can make it harder to > organise things later. > >> It would be a service to our readers to end this practice entirely: if >> a link is good enough to be hidden on a talk page (supposedly in the >> interests of incorporating it in the future*), then it is good enough >> to put at the end of External Links or a Further Reading section, and >> our countless thousands of readers will not be deprived of the chance >> to make use of it. > > I agree absolutely that external links and further reading should be > used far more than they are. I think the problem is that people are > paranoid about link farms and link spam and look at number of links > rather than quality or organisation. It does help to organise very > large external link sections into subsections, both to help readers > (in finding what may be of interest) and the editors (in trimming > where needed and organsing what is there). > >> * one of my little projects is compiling edits where I or another have >> added a valuable source to an article Talk page, complete with the >> most relevant excerpts from that source, and seeing whether anyone >> bothered making any use of that source/link in any fashion. I have not >> finished, but to summarize what I have seen so far: that justification >> for deletion is a dirty lie. Hardly any sources are ever restored. > > If there is no discussion, you would be fully justified in adding the > source yourself. If there is discussion, then, well, you need to > discuss. Have a look at my recent talk page edits for one way in which > I use article talk pages. The other aspect to all this is that many > editors make editorial decisions silently, in their head, or briefly > mentioned in edit summaries, and it can be hard for later editors to > understand why something was cut or trimmed down. If a longer > explanation is posted to the talk page, that can help, though for the > largest articles, having mini-essays on the talk page explaining how > each individual section of the article was put together would be a > massive undertaking. What I do think would be helpful is a subpage for > each article (or article talk page), listing the rejected material > (sometimes the material is better placed in a different article). That > would save a lot of repetition and aid organisation not only of the > included material, but the excluded material. > > Carcharoth > > _______________________________________________ > WikiEN-l mailing list > WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org > To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: > https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: https://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
