Board Thread:General Wiki Discussion/@comment-10502460-20180808031955

So for those who aren't aware, this wiki is in the middle of a contentious debate over whether to demote one of our admins.

I won't link to the thread since I'm sure most are aware of it and probably sick of seeing it, but suffice it to say it's the first time a demotion vote has been taken in a good long while on this wiki, and it has raised some questions regarding how such measures should be handled in the future.

One of the issues that people have been bringing up is the amount of natter/off-topic chatter that many including myself have ended up engaging in on the thread. The line between what is important content and what is simple useless distraction has been difficult to determine as there are several simultaneous conversations happening at once, and while each of these greater conversations may be important, the individual replies within each one often appear irrelevant prima facie.

In my opinion much of this is due to the fact that we use the forums for proposals, which to me seem rather clunky and impractical for the purpose. The issues with this format I have noticed include:


 * The fact that you have to click "quote" in order to reply to anyone. There is no way to make a reply without it automatically quoting the whole post, which can be annoying especially if you are quoting a long chain of stacked quotes.  While you can try to edit out some of the quoted text to focus only on what you want, it is very easy to mess it up so that your own reply gets hidden, turned into a quote itself, etc, and I recently stopped bothering to try after making many such mistakes.


 * The fact that you have to hover your cursor over the bottom of a post to even see the "Quote" and "More" boxes, which can leave some users not knowing how to reply to posts, a problem I have found with the forums in general.


 * The fact that replies appear in strict chronological order and there are no options for topical organization, making it difficult to follow the multiple conversations going on at once on a highly controversial post like a demotion proposal. As far as I know there is not even an option to make a post "sticky".


 * Each person's individual post takes up a lot of screen space, meaning on a post with a lot of replies like the current demotion thread which currently has over 200 posts, you have to do lots and lots and lots and lots of scrolling to keep up with what's going on. Furthermore, in my experience the website will not automatically "jump" you down to new activity when you click on it, at least for threads with a lot of replies like the demotion thread, which means you have to scroll all the way down through the dozens and dozens of posts just to see someone's latest reply.


 * When an admin deletes a reply, it doesn't just disappear, there is still the "This reply has been removed" notice, which means they still clutter up the thread even after deletion.


 * using the forums for a demotion proposal seems to have had the effect of discouraging users from using the General board until the current controversy blows over, at least to my observation.

Notice that we do not use the forums for rights requests, instead we simply use special pages that eliminate many of the hassles I just mentioned. I propose that we do likewise for demotion conversations in the future. However, unlike rights applications I suggest that the pages be set up in talk page format. This would make things easier by:


 * Grouping conversations. Each person's vote would be under a section heading, and responses would be made under that heading and signed by each user, so that the conversation isn't all over the place like with the forums.


 * Making it easy for admins to keep track of the conversation, see and count votes easily without having to sift through off-topic natter, and allowing them to remove invalid votes and spam comments without the "This reply has been removed".


 * Giving admins flexibility to edit and manage the page. For example, the admins could create a talk section at the top right under the OP with "Important reminder: only votes that state a valid reason for voting that way will be counted and others may be removed" or "Official warning: I have noticed that this conversation has started to devolve into back-and-forth insults.  The next person who makes a personal attack against another user is subject to a ban", etc, and there could be a special talk section for off-topic general questions about the demotion process and the like.


 * Allowing you to "jump" to new activity when you click it in the activity feed.

This is an informal proposal, and I don't have the authority to call an official vote, but you can use the vote templates if you want:

 