What is a talk page?

A talk page is simply a topic that allows people to discuss the contents of another page. It is an idea that has been borrowed from Wikipedia.

Reasons to have a talk page:

• It means that pages can be created without having a discussion thread on them. This will make the page more compact and easier to read. It will also provide a gentle incentive for people to refactor the discussion from the Talk Page onto the main page.
• It separates the two separate sets of information: what goes on the topic page itself; and what do we think about the information on the topic page.
• This separation should encourage discussion about what should go on the page. This is certainly true for Wikipedia where contributors talk about changes they feel should be made to the page. In the context of Codev, this could result in topics actually being refactored - something that does not regularly happen at present. * It allows discussion to take place "behind the scenes". At the time of writing I am aware of the need to discuss something that's going on in the ConsultantsForHire page. It would be difficult to have the discussion on that page due to the fact that it is customer facing and we don't really want to hang out our dirty washing for the world to see. A talk page would overcome this problem. (Due to the fact that the TalkPagesForTWiki concept is new the link to the talk page would have to be in a prominent place - but if the talk page concept is taken up by the community, as I hope it is, then the link could be somewhere unobtrusive.)

If you want to create a talk page

Simply create a new page with the title

%TOPIC%Talk

. In other words, the name of the topic with "Talk" tacked onto the end.

More Information

The page TalkPagesForTWiki provides more information on the overall concept but, in time, it is hoped that it will be refactored onto this page.

-- Contributors: MichaelCorbett - 24 Mar 2008