User blog comment:BertH/New Forums now available in Labs/@comment-188432-20121205060437

Toughpigs said:
 * We designed the Discussion module to be an entry point for new people -- a way to find out what our readers want to learn more about, and a way to show off the knowledgeable and passionate fans who have written the articles -- and are still writing them.


 * A wiki is never finished, and it never should be. Every page is always "under construction". That's the excitement and the power of the wiki platform. Hiding the discussions and the process behind a link means that we lose the opportunity to share that excitement with our readers.

Danny, I'll agree that there's community value in showing off any discussions that are currently ongoing about and article — as long as you agree that simple math doesn't support the notion that a page without discussion is "under construction". I'm fine with currently-active discussions showing up a the bottom of articles. What I don't find acceptable in any way is the presence of the message when there's no active discussion on offer.

Only a tiny fraction of articles are actually involved in forum discussions at any one moment. We have 31,000 articles at Tardis. Wookieepedia has over 100,000 articles. If you've got 50 active forum — not talk page, but forum —  discussions going on —  you're doing very well. I wonder how many wikis can actually claim a number that high. I'm not sure we can. But let's be super, super optimistic and say that you have 50 discussions on a young wiki with only 1,000 pages. That means that 95% of that wiki is not ever going to be under discussion at any one time.

So it's completely spurious to contend that Related Discussions is showing that the wiki isn't finished. You seem to be suggesting — and I don't think you actually believe this, but the inference can certainly be made from your post —that an article isn't finished unless it's being discussed. Which simply isn't mathematically true. It would be beyond unrealistic to expect that there would ever come a time that all 31,000 pages at Tardis would be under discussion. How many active users would that take? How many administrators would be required to read all of those discussions and ensure they were going smoothly?

No, Danny, it is the normal state of an article to not be under discussion. Discussion is the symptom of an unfinished article. it is not, as you seem to indicate, something to be hoped for, or an indication that an article is complete. According to your logic, I very much fear that the Department of Transportation would only put up construction signs after the road outside your house was repaved — as an indication that one day they'd be back to pave it again.

Let's look at the default condition of the Related Discussion "there's no discussion here" message, found at MediaWiki:Forum-related-discussion-zero-state-creative.


 * You can find discussions about everything related to this wiki on Forum!

Which is a lie. A ridiculous lie. As the math shows, you can find forum discussions about practically nothing related to any wiki. But I don't want to make you scan up for the math. I'll do it again, this time using Muppet numbers.

As of right now, you've got 25,591 articles at w:c:muppet. There are 9 active discussions. Let's assume, and it may be a bad assumption, that all of those discussions are linked to a page. That's .035% of articles that are being discussed. How many articles would have to be discussed to get 1 percent of articles under discussion? 256. Is that at all realistic? Of course it's not. Will you ever have 256 discussions simultaneously at muppet? No. And that only gets you to 1%! For there to be a credible claim that it's "normal" for articles to be discussed in the forum, you'd have to be talking about 50% of the articles under discussion. That's 12,795 simultaneous forum discussions.

So this Related Discussions thing isn't even placeholder text. It's not like you can even say "to be added" with a straight face. It is absolutely the moral equivalent of adding a bit of text to every page at Muppet that says, "There's still no news about a new version of The Muppet Show, but as soon as there is something we'll leave a message right here."

No, no, no — that's not it. The bigger your wiki is, the more and more it's like a letter to Santa Claus actually reaching some jolly old elf in Lapland. At least there's a chance that there might be a new version of The Muppet Show.