Village Pump (policy): Talk Pages

Even though we have lots of rules and guidelines, reminding people that the purpose of the talk pages is not to have technical discussions about the article's subject it nevertheless happens all the time, and it isn't surprising:

It seems like the perfect place to ask for help, or to discuss the intricacies of a specific command if a discussion page is right there, next door, to the subject you want to talk about. What better place to have the relevant discussions than there!? Anybody who wants to know about that particular command/subject will find the technical descriptions on one page, and the related discussions on the next one. Makes perfect sense...

Unfortunately, the technology of a Wiki is not really suited for that kind of discussions. Originally those pages were created to talk about what might be appropriate for the article, or to point out errors or inaccuracies. These would be brief exchanges that are solved sooner or later, and then discarded.
The posting tools and technologies are rather basic and not very user-friendly (after all, it's just another Wiki page). There are no threading tools, everything is squeezed together on one page, which may even contain multiple subjects, and finding out who posted what and when, and in reply to whom, is sometimes quite hard. Discussion pages aren't included in the search, so unless somebody is looking for the article page itself, they will never find the content of the discussion via the search function.

So... We got a bit of a dilemma here...

It is obvious that people love the talk pages, and find them the perfect place to discuss the articles. On the other hand, they're not very easy to use, formatting is a pain for non-wiki users, they are not searched, and are frequently purged to make room for new discussions.

Should we just forget about those rules and let the users decide in what way and how much to use them (despite its drawbacks)? Can anybody think of a solution that takes into consideration the shortcomings of the talk pages as well as the needs and preferences of the users?

My ideal solution would be to have a reciprocal link on each article page that goes directly to a connected discussion page on the BI Forum - something like one thread per command etc. But, of course, that would require a serious expansion of the forum, and at the very least the installation of some extensions for the Wiki. Perhaps even some custom coding. So probably not very likely to happen...;)

Just to start off the discussion, here are some opinions posted regarding the talk pages (there were some other ones I remembered making some good points, but I can't find the pages anymore on which they were posted, and since the talk pages can't be searched, I'm out of luck...) --Kronzky 06:56, 19 August 2006 (CEST)

(previously posted opinions regarding the talk pages)

• "its the best place to do it. everyone can participate, everyone can see it. even the developers think its important."
• "BIS Forum isnt the place for it - only here decent people still like to talk as the wiki scares the public crowd off. This is probably still a topic for the release version of ArmA. The topic will hopefully (at least partially) become obsolete with the ArmA release or a future patch. One can make exceptions for the sake of usefulness, right? "
• "This is better suited elsewhere but we all know this will not continue on the BI forums and if it did, would be invaded by the general public. [...] Some of this is extremely relevant and important."

I see it like this. BI said that the wiki should become the primary source for information about the technical part of ArmA. Yet for various reasons the information in here is still rather sparse and incomplete. That is why people ask.

On the other hand it is the only place where some technical details are revealed at all. So people can only find the information here.

Now a discussion can happen as either the information is not clear / comprehensive or (not matter if its true or not) some technical aspects seem to "need" improvement.

So this is primarly pre-release talk about ArmA. Once a playable version is out, people will test for themselves (which is not solely a good thing ).

For this reason i suggest to move those discussions each in a new wiki page to be searchable. No big formating or clean up required. It's temporary chat.

About the overall question of participation: Not many peope already have ArmA in their hands, so people can't say much about it. ;)

I think it's understandable that people aren't merging their ofp knowledge in here at this point. It may either become obsolete soon anyway or they prefere to use their time on their own projects still based on OFP. --WGL.Q 07:49, 19 August 2006 (CEST)