Thread:452/@comment-188432-20121212174307

Hey, I understand that you're trying to help people understand about the way Wikipedia does talk page indentation, and that's generally a good thing. Not everyone will adopt the new forum, and some wikis will continue to have traditional MW talk spaces. So it's a skill worth talking about.

However, it may not be universally helpful to stress current policy at Wikipedia. What you're pushing as the "correct" way is something that has not always been the correct way, and it's clearly one of two ways that has been accepted at Wikipedia. Many Wikipedians, myself included, were trained by wikipedia:help:using talk pages to simply indent each new post, as this April 2007 revision clearly shows. A lot of Wikipedians (and by extension some Wikians) remember a time prior to 2006 when there weren't actually any hard rules at all.

Truth is, there was a lot of debate in the early days of wiki editing — and certainly Wikipedia editing — about exactly how it should go. And that's reflected in wikipedia:help:using talk pages' history, too. It was briefly the method you suggest in 2006, then it was the "indent every new post" method until it went back to the "call and response" method around the turn of 2008. Eventually, the "indent every new post" side simply stopped bothering to edit the help file, and the "call and response" crowd got their way. But people still regularly use the "indent every post" method at Wikipedia.

So I think you're probably expressing a bit too much certainty when you actively insist that there's a "right" way to indent on talk pages. There are a couple of different methods, each with their strengths and weaknesses, each with some claim on the notion of being "the Wikipedia way".

Not that "the Wikipedia way" matters, since this is Wikia, and local wikis are free to accept, reject or totally ignore Wikipedia at their leisure. Or to bypass the issue by choosing to accept comments and/or walls instead of talk pages. .   