Talk Page for Talk Page Concept

• This page is a TalkPage for TalkPageConcept so please feel free to add your comments.
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• For an explanation of the TalkPage concept please see TalkPageConcept.
• This page has been copied from another page and has not always been a talk page. The person who did this (MichaelCorbett) apologizes if author's names/dates have got confused.

Michael Corbett, date

• There was widespread agreement that there were too many pages on the old project that consisted of far too much discussion and far too much disorganized content.
• With this in mind the ProjectCulture resulted in the Comment PlugIn being disabled on Foswiki.
• I believe this is a good decision but that we still need some way of having some discussion about a topic.
• On the old project the I proposed the system of talk pages. This met with some support but the project culture on the old project meant that the system was not taken up.
• I would like to propose the system again and, hopefully gain agreement that we should pursue this course.
• We would then need to ensure that this system became part of the ProjectCulture.

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Author, date I like the concept of talk/discussion pages for topics where the discussion should not pollute the topic itself (like the task teams). It would be a winner if somehow this concept can be integrated into the new skin, to make it easy to switch between pages.

Crawford Currie, 18 November 2008

There are pros and cons to talk pages. Here are some pros:

• Keeps important pages clean and free from noise
• Gives a clear and simple "spam filter" for people who use changes automation to monitor important changes

And here are some cons

• The automation isn't adequate. Talk pages are not clearly linked to their parent and are hard to elide from changes.
• Return of the "throw a comment at it" culture in some areas, and a lack of refactoring
• It has to be a judgement call when you use a talk page, and there are insufficient guidelines (actually that's currently a good thing, as these sorts of guidelines need to come from learned experience and not be imposed by fiat)

-- MichaelDaum - 18 Nov 2008

How about Dev topics for extensions? Shall we make them Talk topics as well? They where used for talking mostly, although Dev (as in development) means more than that (planing features etc). But those additional aspects might best be handled within the Task web anyway.

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It would make sense to me to integrate a plugin such as Sven's TalkContrib with a new %<nop>META:TALK{... tag or even surrounding the talk part of a topic with a META:STARTTALK META:ENDTALK. That way the talk is inextricably tied to the topic itself (granted this could provide some challenges when dealing with history on the topic itself). At bare minimum it would be nice if there was a bit of meta data linking a topic with its corresponding talk topic so we're not relying only on naming convention.

-- DrewStevenson - 23 Feb 2009