User blog comment:BertH/New Forums now available in Labs/@comment-188432-20121203221259/@comment-188432-20121204090727

Sorry for the delay in responding.

The quickest way to answer your question about the Reference Desk is to point you to this board's original form or that iteration's original archives. I should quickly point out that the Reference Desk is not a "general purpose" board as you alleged. The reference desk is for people who are experts in one aspect of Doctor Who to share their knowledge with others who don't know quite so much about it.

This contrasts with the purpose of talk pages (ns:1), which are for figuring out how best to edit the article.

Sure, there's occasionally some overlap between the two, but by and large the reference desk is used for questions that are a little more complicated than the one you've pointed out. They generally revolve around trying to figure out some kind of narrative "truth" across multiple stories, or some kind of behind-the-scenes issue.

A good example from the past month — though you may not understand it if you don't know Doctor Who — is tardis:forum:The Three Doctors not Season 6B? Other good examples are tardis:forum:Is Torchwood series 2 really split into episodes set in 2008 and 2009? and tardis:forum:Time measurement units on Gallifrey.

Basically, the reference desk is kinda like a really geeky version of Doctor Who Answers Wiki. The questions aren't about single articles, but they're asked so that an editor can walk away with the ability to write several articles better. We don't mind someone popping in for a simple factoid, like this Pest Control question, but if you flip through the archives, what emerges is that the questions and answers are generally multifaceted.

Now, all that said, I think I do understand the point of the Related Discussions feature. For instance, look at the way I added topics to Tardis:Thread:117335. I get what it's trying to accomplish.

My problem is exactly what I stated before. I am deeply troubled by the presence of a button saying "start a discussion" on 31,100+ other pages, just tempting users to avoid the talk pages and our local policies. If we wanted chatter, we'd prolly have enabled user comments, dontcha think? We chose talk pages because we want them to be used. We don't want them bypassed. We don't want questions about a specific page appearing in the Forum area. We want them at the talk page. Wikia gave us the ability to expect that ability when you made user comments optional. Having this thing not be optional is therefore inconsistent.

I mean, okay, it's optional to choose the new forums at all, but to throw out the new forums just because we can't  the Related Discussions is the literal definition of throwing the baby out with the bath water.

I'm further concerned by the fact that the vast majority of pages will have no content in this area. This area will only light up when there's an actual discussion ongoing. How many active discussions will we possibly have at once? 50 or 100 in a very busy time? Out of 31,100 articles, that's a truly tiny percentage. That means 31,000 pages will have their design compromised for no reason whatsoever.

The true goal of Related Discussions is to drive people to the forums. If you want to make sure people go to the forum, do add the Forum Activity Module — with all those glittering avatars — to the right rail of every page. Or, maybe, you could allow us to display:none every element except for the active discussion link.

But don't force us to add a grey lump of text saying "there's nothing here" to the bottom of a page, or a button that allows people to create forum threads directly from an article.

And finally, I feel obliged to point out that this Related Discussions feature only works in the main namespace. A lot of our discussions are about every namespace except main. We talk Template, Category, File, Help, Project — the lot. Just scroll through tardis:forum:Panopticon archives. If this feature doesn't work in all namespaces, its usefulness is further diminished.

I currently have one thread with a topic from Help and one with a topic from Category. But nothing shows up when you click through to those pages.

And, yanno, because we like to talk about more than ns:0, those incredibly optimistic estimates of 50-100 active discussions probably only translate to 10-30 articles that will actually have an enabled Related Discussion Module. Assuming, of course, that the editor remembers to even add the topic in the first place.