User:Andrewa/thread mode warnings

Hi. This is a personal notice. It's not protected, in the spirit of Wikis, but this particular page is intended to represent my views on a particularly sensitive subject. In view of this, IMO any update of it by others is vandalism, however trivial you think it is. So instead, please discuss anything you want changed (including this notice of course) on my talk page. Andrewa 22:40, 23 Apr 2004 (UTC)

Please, I do mean that. This page represents my views. Any change however trivial risks misrepresenting them in ways you may not have thought of. I respond promptly to all suggestions made on my talk page, and even those made elsewhere, and the unauthorised change (see the history if you like) is no problem, but the principle is important IMO. If you find it necessary to modify it in any way, just copy it. Is that so hard? Andrewa 00:21, 15 Jun 2004 (UTC)

There are a few users who say they object to thread mode discussions. They participate in these discussions, but they link their contributions to personal warning notices such as those archived below.

What these seem to mean is that they will modify their comments after people have replied to them, destroying the thread and sometimes making other peoples' replies look quite silly. And this is exactly what has happened in practice. Some problems with this are:

It makes it very difficult to reply.
It makes it very difficult to follow the threads of a discussion, which is what makes it difficult to reply.
It seems to serve no purpose other than #1 and #2 above.
The discussions in question are already in thread mode. This is the tradition of the pages in question, and it's doubtful that anyone has the right to unilaterally change it.
It seems dangerously likely to mislead, despite the warnings. In particular, sometimes comments are indented or bulleted by the authors and appear to be thread mode discussions but are also accompanied by these warnings. This seems to be a contradiction.

If you followed a link leading here from a threaded discussion, then whoever posted the link that led you here was (probably) attempting to reply to a posting linked to one of these warnings.

In order to safely interpret (or reply to) comments made under these conditions, I'm afraid you really need to look at the history of the page on which they were made. This is not difficult, just inconvenient.

This is not my fault, nor is it the fault of anyone else who links here. It's an inevitable consequence of the way those who post these anti-thread mode warnings are using, or I would say abusing, the Wiki.

Now the warning that they were responding to by pointing you here may or may not still be there, and it may or may not have changed even if it is there. Now you see it, now you don't. Again, you can easily find out by checking the history, if you feel that it is good use of your time.

You can probably assume that anyone linking here won't modify their own comments without considering the effect on subsequent discussion, and will respect their responsibility not to mislead the reader as to the context of comments made as part of a discussion. It's the other guy ya gotta watch.

Some opinions from the author of this page

With reference to point #1 above, I find it so difficult to reply to that on occasions it has effectively gagged me. I don't know whether this is a deliberate tactic, but it's an effective one. This page is an attempt to overcome this.

How do you reply to a comment that might change anytime, and that certainly will change if you make any effective criticism of it?

I've tried the suggestion below that replies should be self-contained. It just doesn't work. It's an interesting idea, but it doesn't work.

If you want to see my comments in the context intended, I can't see any reasonable alternative to looking at the history. This seems to be what is meant below by This is a wiki, let's use the features it provides. The mind boggles.

I have absolutely no objection to unthreaded discussion. On the contrary, I think that this is the very thing that Wikis do best. In a sense, unthreaded discussion is the very essence of a Wiki. But I also think that:

Threaded discussion has a place too.
It is very important to know which is occurring.
It is not good to mix them. Allowing both to exist side by side is another any Wiki, and a MediaWiki Wiki in particular, does very well indeed.
But to do this you need to obey some simple, commonsense rules...
- ...one of which is that, in a threaded discussion, you don't modify what you've said after someone else has replied to it, until the time comes to refactor the whole conversation.

Despite their claims, these users are not using the facilities of MediaWiki very well at all IMO. Essentially this is a configuration management problem, and they don't seem to know even the most elementary principle of CM - that the consequences of a change need to be considered.

Threaded conversations work well too, and for some things they are superior to unthreaded. But a mixture is just asking for trouble. This is a continuing debate on other Wikis, see meta:user:andrewa/Thread mode experiment for some links.

The archives below are necessary because the warnings themselves are covered by the warnings. They may or may not be the warning given on the page you've come from, and the warning you read there may or may not be the one I read when I made comments on the same page. Again, this can all be resolved by going to the history of the warning pages, if you feel this is good use of your time.

I don't, so the archives below at least give you some reliable idea of what the warnings might have said.

So, what's to be done?

My solution is simple, but savage.

All postings of persons who use these warnings on threaded discussion pages should be disregarded. They just aren't worth the time that it takes to untangle them. In time, this should become a policy.
- This applies to all postings, whether explicitly linked to a warning or not. The warnings say that all postings are work in progress, not just the ones explicitly labelled.
- It doesn't prevent posting a reply. Sometimes this may be helpful to others who read the discussion. However this should be done with caution, see below.
- There should be some mechanism for rehabilitation of users who experiment with these warnings but decide to bow to community consensus that threaded discussion is valuable.

The articles written and edited by these people should be accepted. They are often great. Don't despise them. We want them as contributors. We just don't want to let them destroy the infrastructure with their poorly-founded minority theories of how a Wiki should work.

When something is said under the cover of one of these warning notices that you think it's helpful to answer:
- Link your answer to here or a similar page.
- Write your answer with a third party reading the thread in mind, not as a reply to the poster.
- As they suggest, try to make your answer stand-alone (good luck).

I intend to try to initiate some unthreaded discussions when I have the time and energy. These can work, in fact they do work elsewhere in this Wiki. Hopefully, this will allow these people to participate in the sorts of discussions which, historically and for other reasons, have always been threaded at Wikipedia.
- See my first attempts at this (now archived).

Boilerplate text

I use [[I'll attempt a reply.|user:andrewa/thread mode warnings]] and you are welcome to use it or something similar to point to this page. If you see anything on the page that you think could make the warning more useful for general use, again raise it on my talk page. Or you can of course set up your own page, feel free to copy any of this page you find useful.

The archives

Please note I have respected the wishes of one of the original authors with respect to quoting them - which is a similar issue.

From User:Anthony DiPierro/warning:

All comments I make are works in progress and are subject to change without warning. I refactor my comments a lot, sometimes I use ~~strikethrough~~, but sometimes I don't consider this reasonable. So if you want to reply to a comment of mine, keep this in mind. Better yet, form a response which stands alone and post it separately, rather than forming a thread. This is a wiki, let's use the features it provides. The concept is similar to that of DoubleWiki, although it's more like MultiWiki, and uses the same page, rather than different ones. I haven't really been following it that closely (mostly because other people pull me into ThreadMode which is hard to escape), but in theory it's the direction I'm trying to move. One example where I think this worked well was on Talk:Drug addiction.

The above refers to me refactoring my own comments. Generally I'd prefer that people don't refactor my comments for me. If my comment is in response to you, and you delete that comment, I'm generally OK with you deleting my response. But if you do so, please leave a message either here or on my user talk page, and don't delete the same comment more than once. If I re-add it, I want to keep it. Alternatively, feel free to quote my comment.

If you do refactor a comment of mine (for example to fix my grammar or spelling), please note that here or on my user talk page. And if I revert your change, please don't revert it back.

If you decide to copy a comment of mine, for instance to refer to it in a response, please put it in quotes or italics and attribute it to me. But don't add my signature, rather use a format such as "Anthony said: whatever". My signature is meant for things which I write in the format I present them, perhaps with exceptions for minor editorial corrections.

From User:JRR Trollkien/warning:

All comments I make are works in progress and are subject to change without warning. I refactor my comments a lot, sometimes I use ~~strikethrough~~, but sometimes this isn't reasonable. So if you want to reply to a comment of mine, keep this in mind. Better yet, form a response which stands alone and post it separately, rather than forming a thread. This is a wiki, let's use the features it provides.