Talk Pages for TWiki

Overview: TWiki.org’s “company culture” seems to favour creating new topics with a discussion box on every page. This encourages discussion (good thing) but it also leads to unfactored pages with a long, sprawling list of comments (bad thing). It is time to examine this “company culture” and see if it serves the community well.

Current State of Codev

There have been some attempts to clean up Codev but some of these attempts at refactoring/re-indexing have resulted in people being flamed. This may be the reason why so little re-factoring takes place on Codev or there may be other reasons – for example the fact that re-factoring takes so much time and effort and yet doesn’t appear to be recognised/rewarded by the community. Whatever the reason, it seems that we are largely stuck with the “Codev Jungle”. This doesn’t mean that we have to propagate more jungle however. What can we do in the future to ensure that future topics are more orderly and well-factored?

Learning from Wikipedia

Wikipedia uses MediaWiki and this wiki engine supports the concept of every page having a discussion page. The result of this feature is that the Wikipedia community creates well factored pages with all the discussion about the page being moved to a separate page. You never see a Wikipedia page with comments on the page itself. If you do, they get swiftly deleted. Wikipedia wouldn’t have had the success that it did without this principle. Who wants to read an encyclopaedia entry that looks like it’s only half written?

A Suggestion for Codev

We can use this principle for Codev. Obviously, Codev isn’t an encyclopaedia and so there’s still a need for pages with a long list of comments but it seems clear that we don’t want all pages to look like this. We need to get smarter about what type of topic to create. We don’t have to be that smart though because it seems that there are only two choices:

• A well factored page with its corresponding “discussion” page (“factored topic”).
• A page with some explanation at the top and a % COMMENT % tag at the bottom – resulting in a discussion from community members (“discussion topic”).

Since TWiki doesn’t support discussion pages like MediaWiki does we need to agree on a convention to ensure that we can replicate the system within TWiki. I propose that we use the convention of the topic name with “Talk” added to the end of it. For example, the topic MarketingHub would have a discussion page called MarketingHubTalk. We can simply refer to these pages as “Talk” pages.

Changing Company Culture

We need to ensure that the Codev “company culture” changes so that:

1. People understand the concept of Talk pages and what they are for.
2. When creating a page people stop and ask themselves what type of page (factored or discussion) to create.
3. When the discussion relating to a discussion topic dies down then people should feel empowered to create a Talk page, move the discussion to that page and do some refactoring on the original page. If anyone gets flamed for doing this then we, as a community, should support the re-factorer.

As every management consultant knows, changing a company culture is one of the hardest things there is – but it can be the thing that produces the greatest results.

Please see this topic's Talk page for discussion as to whether this is a good idea and, if so, how do we ensure adoption by the community.

-- Contributors: MichaelCorbett - 24 Mar 2008