Talk pages

[The_Earl]

I think that we should limit discussions on this forum and try to do most discussing on the talk page of the relevant area. There is a Meta namespace for structural discussions.

I worry that Wiki users will not know of this forum, and will not be able to participate in the discussions.

I will try to make a point of posting a notice here, but keeping the discussion on the wiki itself.

Thanks
The Earl

[ritcheymt-p40]

The strength of doing most of the discussion on the wiki is that we'll be building documentation on the vetting of ideas and how we arrived at decisions. One weakness of doing the discussion in the forums will be mitigated soon -- we will link the wiki to the forums. I think we haven't quite found our ideal medium for vetting ideas, though, because two strengths of the forums aren't addressed yet in the wiki: First, the forum is nice because there you can get a view of all the issues at once, whereas in the wiki there's nothing that will draw you to all the talk pages where wiki dev ideas are being vetted. Second, the forum has a polling tool that the wiki lacks. It's helpful in prompting users to vote on a dev issue. How can we marry the best of both worlds?

[The_Earl]

...The forum is nice because there you can get a view of all the issues at once, whereas in the wiki there's nothing that will draw you to all the talk pages where wiki dev ideas are being vetted....

I think this could be corrected with a 'Current Projects' page. A page like that would have other benefits as well, as we could point newbies to places in the wiki that needed their help.

...Second, the forum has a polling tool that the wiki lacks. It's helpful in prompting users to vote on a dev issue. How can we marry the best of both worlds?

Yeah, the forum polls are nice. I am not sure how to get poll-like pages on a wiki.

If we can tightly couple the forum and the wiki, then my concerns about losing people go away. Let me know what you need help with to get the two talking.

Thanks
The Earl

[cannona-p40]

I think this could be corrected with a 'Current Projects' page. A page like that would have other benefits as well, as we could point newbies to places in the wiki that needed their help.

I think it would be prudent to associate a date with each addition to the "current projects" page. Otherwise, pages end up getting put on the page, and no one wants to ever take them off because they figure, well, someone is still working on this. If each project had a date associated with it, then it would be a simple matter to arbitrarily remove all projects that had a date older than two months or whatever. Of course, if the project was a long-term one, then the date could be easily updated to show that it was still current.

Yeah, the forum polls are nice. I am not sure how to get poll-like pages on a wiki.

Just have people do something like the following:

Edit the poll page, and add their name to a list in the appropriate section of the page like
* ~~~~

Aaron

[ritcheymt-p40]

[SNIP] the forum polls are nice. I am not sure how to get poll-like pages on a wiki.

If we can tightly couple the forum and the wiki, then my concerns about losing people go away. Let me know what you need help with to get the two talking.

Wanna find a nice polling plugin for MediaWiki? We have engineers who could plug it in....

Also, it might help if we had a contributor portal. We could link to the forums from there....

[The_Earl]

Wanna find a nice polling plugin for MediaWiki? We have engineers who could plug it in....

Also, it might help if we had a contributor portal. We could link to the forums from there....

I will take a look around. I have a few suggestions for a integration, so I will get them rolling over at the wiki.

Thanks
The Earl

[garysturn]

I will take a look around. I have a few suggestions for a integration, so I will get them rolling over at the wiki.

Thanks
The Earl

I don't think we should try to integrate the wiki to these forums for research topics. I think there needs to be forums created directly in the wiki for research topics. A research forum where there can be discussion groups set up for each of the countries and states to discuss research methods.

These tech forums are great to discuss technical matters. It would be OK to link here for technical topics, but we really need research forums inside the wiki.

[Thomas_Lerman]

I did a quick search for

MediaWiki poll

and found several listed below (I did not list them all):

These look like what you are looking for:
http://wikipoll.free.fr/mediawiki-1.6.5/index.php?title=Help:Contents
http://halo.wikia.com/wiki/MediaWiki:Poll_instructions
http://codesnippets.wikia.com/wiki/Template:Poll
http://www.ami-communities.eu/wiki/Polls

This may work, I saw one place that talked about this working for MediaWiki, but did not find more instructions:
http://www.proxy2.de/poll/index.php

A manual style poll (may not be what you are looking for):
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Language_order_poll
http://www.infoanarchy.org/en/MediaWiki_Migration_Poll

[The_Earl]

I did a quick search for and found several listed below (I did not list them all):

Nice, I will have to poke through them. I had only searched wikipedia proper, not other wiki projects.

A manual style poll (may not be what you are looking for):

Wikipedia generally uses a manual poll style for their day-to-day things. If you look at the various admin pages, like merging, banning, etc, most people weigh in with a signature under their vote, and / or a comment and signature.

A manual style may work for us, but I worry that without a good guideline, the formatting problems that we have discussed at the FCKEditor page may bite us.

Thanks
The Earl

[Thomas_Lerman]

Good point. But if it just a signature, then formatting is not really an issue. However, we probably would still want comments to be added with replies to these comments, which may cause it to be an issue.