We all know how talk pages need to be moved to a subpage after getting too long, and sometimes OT comments/sections need to be copypasted in different talk pages, and how this break links and follows.
This happens because talk pages work like content pages but they really have different purposes: discussions are based on people's interest i.e. recent activity and number of contributions, not quality, exhaustiveness and such; and contributions are additions to the current version, showed in chronological order, not the constantly changing result of multiple additions, subtractions and modifications to already existing items.
It's very hard to make talk page work by following paradigms of something with such different purposes. So, which paradigm works better for discussions about different topics that are meant to last forever?
The only one I know is the good old forum paradigm: each topic gets its own page, and even single comments are considered their own item with their own ID, so they can be shuffled around easily without breaking links.
How can this translate to regular MediaWiki editable pages? Not well, I guess, but we could get closer to a forum-like structure without sacrificing the classic MediaWiki experience by:
- Treating any new comment (not reply) as a new section, so instead of "add topic" and such it should be "add comment". Basically what the NDT is already doing but without suggesting sections are intended to change topic.
- Not having to title sections. They could be automatically titled with a progressive number which is dynamically based on the current position of the comment in relations to other comments (such as an item in a numbered list).
- Section titles should also be much less evident and intrusive, maybe by showing the number on the left side of the comment instead of on top.
- Whatever method that is currently used to identify followed sections, should be used to identify single sections in order to being able move them to a different page. It would be optimal if that leaved an automatic message "this comment was moved to page X" with a link, or something like that.
- When a new comment makes the page reach a fixed limit in comments (or other statistics), the page is automatically moved to a subpage, while the comment itself stays in the parent page.
- An automatic list of subpages is created on top of talk pages, basically like vanilla breadcrumbs links, except they should also show the closest supbages and the last one.
- It would be really, really helpful to have a special version of RecentChanges that focused on what's important for discussions and doesn't show other things: user who added the last comment/reply (not any edit in general), time, an excerpt of the comment/reply, and a link to the comment and to the talk page where it's found. Users could include this simplified RC in any page where they want to keep track of discussions only. I know it's already doable with vanilla RCs but it's a little messy with all those additional infos.