Discussion

It reminds me of what we have in the Plugins web: for each plugin topic FooPlugin there's a FooPluginDev, where the discussion is.

I think the idea is good, we can even add support for it in the template of course, all that's needed is some button 'Talk!' that links to a topics talk page.

This only adresses one of the problems with Codev though, there are others left such as the fact that there's a lot of stale/outdated content around and the lack of intuitive navigation (which is partly addressed in the twiki.org redesign of course).

Also, does the Talk page solve the problem, or just move it to another topic (under the carpet :)?

-- KoenMartens - 24 Mar 2008

No, I really think it is a good idea, and is necessary. It may not be sufficicient, I guess another good idea that I have seen used more and more would be an "Archive" page to keep only the "Hot" discussion on the talk page , moving the past discussions there under a TOC-visible title so you can link to them. An alternative could be, when you want to archive discussion, regroup the relevant discussion in a TOC section, and delete it but leave a pointer to this section in the last revision it was active.

-- ColasNahaboo - 24 Mar 2008

Koen - I'm not saying that this is a "magic bullet" solution but I think it is much more than brushing the topic under the carpet. I really feel that the Talk Page concept is a major factor in keeping Wikipedia so well factored.

Colas - I agree when you say it is necessary but not sufficient and you set me thinking about what else we could do. Wikipedia tags pages as being candidates for various things: candidates for deletion; candidates for clean up etc etc. We could adopt this idea. Pages that were important to our project but were in need of refactoring could be identified as such. This would give people authority to do some refactoring - and protect them from being flamed in case people didn't like the way they'd refactored the page.

What do you think?

-- MichaelCorbett - 25 Mar 2008

As a user rather than a developer, but one who frequently comes to Codev to try to learn more about TWiki, I think both of these are great ideas. And I think the "candidate for . . ." idea makes the Talk page and even stronger idea.

-- DavidWolfe - 26 Mar 2008

"Candidate for" is a good idea, maybe combining it with a "N days rule". Somebody would set the topic to a status of "Candidate for ..." (deletion, archiving, refactoring, ...), and if nobody objects in N days, anybody should be entitled to perform the operation. N is 14 for features, but for topic refactoring a smaller value may be more practical. A page listing all Candidates topics in pre-N and post-N will help the process.

-- ColasNahaboo - 27 Mar 2008

Candidates is another excellent idea from Michael!

On Talk pages; some simple automation could really help here; for example, a prominent link/botton in the template to the Talk page for a topic, if it exists. A drop-down, similar to the one in Support web, for changing the candidate status of a page using a Comment box.

-- CrawfordCurrie - 27 Mar 2008

Seems to me you are talking about a feature similar to wikipedia's "Discuss" tab, and I think they have a really good idea there but mainly because that option is presented as a tab at the top of each topic. I don't believe having a talk tab for topics would be "just moving the discussion to another page" because thats not what its for, the talk tab is for a meta discussion about the topic discussion, a sidebar, if you will

-- TravisBarker - 27 Mar 2008

See TalkTalk for more info about the "discuss topic" / "back to topic" buttons you now see on this and the MarketingHub pages. Its derived from TalkContrib, which I will fill out over time with other ways of implementing Talk topics - both as examples of what you can do with TWiki, and because each implementation has different process and social effects.

-- SvenDowideit - 10 Apr 2008

due to the configuration parameters, TalkContrib can link the Contrib and ContribDev topics without modification - and even to make their creation use the correct topic template.

-- SvenDowideit - 10 Apr 2008