[support] current wiki tools in drupal - talk vs comments

[Shai Gluskin]

Ari,

You bring up a good point - the distinction between a comment (e.g. a
response to content) versus meta-discussion, comments about the crafting of
the content. My problem with separate "Talk" pages is that so few people
ever notice them. I have a stump speech I give to school faculties about how
Wikipedia works and very, very, few people have ever been on a Wikipedia
talk page, even though it is the most radical, exciting, thing about
Wikipedia, that the process of crafting information is transparent to
readers of that information --- if only they ever clicked on the "talk" tab!

So I think it is possible that "talk" might be seen by more people if it
were on the same page.

I also agree that using the standard comment interface within a Drupal site
in which non-wiki content types have comments turned on, could be very
confusing -- ("response" comments desired for one content-type
"content-creation meta comments" for another).

Keeping "talk" on the same page as the content might be less confusing with
custom theming of the comments for wiki content-type, together with clear
explanatory statements about what the purpose of the talk is.

Given the success of Wikipedia and the Wikimedia design many use-cases would
recommend us to clone the Wikimedia style so that "Wiki" expectations would
be met by the users. There are other populations for whom that UI cloning
wouldn't be particularly helpful, and may be a barrier.

Shai

On 3/9/08, Ari Davidow <aridavidow at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>
> Regarding "Talk" -- from a UI perspective I think it is one of the worst
> > things about mediawiki. I think that Drupal's stock comments implementation
> > on the same page as the node is much better than having a talk page on a
> > separate page.
>
>
> We may have to disagree here. I think of the "talk" page as a place for
> meta-discussion--discussion about an  article, say, if we were to use the
> MediaWiki example. I would want "comments", were they implemented for a page
> (MediaWiki doesn't do this, presumably on the assumption that non-meta
> comments belong as edits in the article) to refer to the =subject= of the
> article.
>
> So, if I write a page on klezmer, and you make some edits with which I
> disagree, the "talk" page is a good place to hash out administrativia, but
> if you and I have different views on klezmer, the "comments" section would
> be a good place for the two of us to discuss (along with anyone else who
> joined in).
>
> Does this make any sense?
>
>
> --
> [ Drupal support list | http://lists.drupal.org/ ]
>
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