It's a very, very bad idea to put all comments in forced full protection (very unclearly called "privacy" in the document), this will make management of most talk pages a nightmare. See also bugzilla:29711.
Topic on Talk:Flow Portal/Archive2
Yeah; it should be called "Ownership" and I even changed one other section so that I could use the term there (the word "ownership" was being overloaded).
I disagree that it's a bad idea to put comments in forced full protection. I also do not agree that user-to-user conversations should really need refactoring. I suppose my big thing with that falls along the lines of "we are doing it wrong if our conversations need to be continually refactored." That's just broken.
Thank you. Again, I was mostly confused by this point not being stated as related to user talks only. (Is this only a temporary confusing state of the document or is there the risk that design decisions taken by having in mind only user talks will affect also completely different situations in later stages of the project?)
Back to the point: it's not broken, it's a wiki. Everything can always be improved, including talks, and I'm not aware of this ever causing any problem, it's just an unjustified assumption. Long threads become completely useless if you can't refactor them: think of the heated bugzilla discussions where it's impossible to distinguish noise, sub-threads, simple corrections, plain off-topic etc. from the meat. Mere chronological listing of posts as is is a completely dead concept which belongs to super old forum systems only, nowadays all discussion/comment systems allow a big degree of what we call refactoring and wikis are very modern in this; if you remove refactoring, you need to invent a shole new system to make discussions manageable and I'm not sure it's worth it.
Breaking refactoring might be a necessary evil at some point, but it mustn't be an aim.
I think the refactoring thing is going to be a longer term discussion but it is one that I'm thinking about heavily.
And yes, the document is in a state of flux. I've actually got a (much) larger version of it but it's a mess and this is the best that I could pull together. I'm going to be focusing on making some mockups to help explain the concepts better; I fear that much of this may make sense only with visuals (for example, how watchlist entries might work).
I agree that comments shouldn't be forced into full protection. On a wiki, everything is editable except for things specifically in need of protection from vandalism and such. We don't even protect user pages. Why should talk page posts by protected? Nobody "owns" anything on the wiki, in my opinion.
I agree as well. While it's generally bad practice to edit others' comments, sometimes there is good reason to do so, and preventing it won't help any when it is indeed needed, such as when include updating links to important pages that may have been moved; fixing misleading but obvious typos; removing personal attacks, links to disruptive sites, and other such material; and so on...
Unsurprisingly, there's consensus that protection makes no sense, e.g. on en.wiki.
There's a consensus that FLOW (as presently described) makes no sense, as well....
That leads to additional questions, though. Will admins be able to protect or semi-protect (a) individual comments, (b) all comments below a specified comment (including the ability to add comments) (c) the ability to create new threads (possibly a subset of (b), depending on configurations)
Also, what can a blocked user do? Only request an unblock? Make comments related to the block? (The ability to question the block without formally requesting an unblock seems a good idea to me.) Comment anywhere on his talk-page-equivalent (which I think still exists)?