This page is for discussing how we want to interact in FeatureRequests. This issue came up in FeatureRequests/DiscussionAndOrCommentPages, while ThiloPfennig did a major refactoring where MartinBayer did not agree and reverted the changes.
The question that came up was how to handle comments on a page. ThiloPfennig thought that we take experiences with ThreadMode seriously we should try to refactor comments to get into DocumentMode. This page is for discussion. If we get to a rough consensus we cann add him on the top of this page but preserve the discussion that has taken place.
ThiloPfennig: Sure. people CAN get angry if they see their comments deleted. But as comments are recognized and the FeatureRequest moves on one should be able to refine the comments into suggestions that are much shorter. I think THIS is really the core of WhyWikiWorks: This is neither a forum nor a static web page. So people CAN add all comments they like to add. But in the end if nobody does any clean up a wiki page gets longer and longer and more and more messy. I agree, though that no points that were mentioned need to get lost, unless they are really irrelevant. This is because if one deletes those comments that got no consensus people might try to bring on the same arguments months or years later. So I suggest to archive some discussions so that we can point to those. I suggest that we talk here just about FeatureRequests, although maybe this discussion could also be generalized. I don't like to get into EditWar because this would harm this wiki and does not help us to implement the feature. -- ThiloPfennig 2006-12-06 15:48:21
ThiloPfennig thinks essentially this is where a webforum or mailing list and a wiki page differ!
- you CAN edit everything (you don't have to, though)
- if you do not edit a page (even comments) a page will continue to grow endlessly, so for me it is clear
- There is no alternative that one has to refactor every wiki page, no matter in what mode
No ThreadMode page that has growing large will be readable to outsiders. So in fact in becomes useless
- I think an alternative is to move old discussions to a speparate page.