Wiktionary:Grease pit/Archiving this page

• Gah! Already 80 kb! —Vildricianus 10:33, 30 May 2006 (UTC)

Looks like quite soon, this page will need to get archived just as much as the Beer parlour. We can use the opportunity to experiment or brainstorm a bit about how to do it better, i.e. topical instead of chronological archival? A kind of categorization of discussions on separate archive pages? For instance, one archive for template discussions, one for CSS, one for general development etc. —Vildricianus 13:18, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Gods, yes! I absented for a day, and came back to several chapters of comments on this page. I am stunned at how popular this conversation area is. I think it indicates that many lingering conceptual problems should have been dealt with sooner, that were never addressed on WT:BP. Also, the recent addition of Vild, Scs, Partick, and Rod, seemed to have given Wiktionary the needed critical-mass for technical improvements. Hard to say which is more relevant.

That said, branching Grease Pit from Beer Parlour was a valuable branch: perhaps further sub-division would be the way to go? There are philosophical improvements, and technical improvements...but perhaps they are, as HT suggests (by creation of this page,) far too intermingled to coherently separate?

I wonder...could we have "live" archive areas, rather than end-of-conversation-never-to-be-mentioned-again archives?

--Connel MacKenzie T C 18:24, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

Please elaborate on that as I don't have a clue what that would mean.

Regarding "new rooms", I was thinking the same, after seeing the GP's popularity. Perhaps we should make the same move for what HT mentioned somewhere on RFD: a mid-area RF* page where entries can be discussed for reasons other than deletion, verification or cleanup? —Vildricianus 18:36, 29 May 2006 (UTC)

I was being cagey only to not insist on my names for the concepts, but rather to encouarge thoughts on what appropriate subdivision might be named. I was under the impression that the multi-word-entry controversy was not a particularly "technical" discussion. At least, not technical in regard to how the wiki software deals with the issue. Perhaps something like "Grease pit (linguistics)" and "Grease pit (technical)"? Then again, maybe it would be better if the multi-word discussion were moved to Wiktionary:Language considerations/English? Or is it truly better off staying right here?

I think the Tea room is the best place for the "in-between" requests. With RFD/RFV/RFT/RFC, I think we have all the general possibilities covered, these days. --Connel MacKenzie T C 16:06, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

I thought about having a room for technical aspects of words, linguists, and lexicography, rather than computer programming. But in reality, how many people do we have who have any training or have read many books in these fields? I think the Tea room might be best re-labelled as a place to discuss words and language generally as well to answer question regarding the articles on particular words. This would slightly different to our current "if it covers more than one word put it in the Beer parlour" policy but we could rework that also by saing the Beer parlour is about policies, which headings to use, which orders to put them in etc rather than "further vs farther" or "is data plural or uncountable". How does that sound? — Hippietrail 17:25, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Regarding the Tea room, that's how I and I think most other Wiktionarians already saw the concept, so it's probably best to spell that out more clearly. I'll take a look at how to reword Wiktionary:Tea room/header.

Also, I've dug up what Hippietrail said on RFD (it's here now):

Further, I think it might make a lot of sense to carry out the disputes on the articles' talk pages rather than here (or RFV) - these pages can be instead lists of links with perhaps a line of text indicating the current status of each dispute. Disputes which involve more than one page might be better off here than in the talk pages.

Anyone still wants to consider that? I don't know what is has to do with archiving this page, though. The Grease pit is more like a part of the Beer parlour – I expect most its atmosphere to be the same – whilst the Tea room is in 99% of the cases specific talk. If we would take full advantage of the Talk: namespace, we should carry out such specific conversations there, or at least, once they have been concluded, move discussions over there rather than to the Tea room archives. If we would follow that proposal, the Tea room could become more congruous to the BP and the GP as a discussion room for general Wiktionary talk, and be more what Connel described as the "Grease pit (linguistics)". —Vildricianus 18:20, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Are you saying we should make all of the tea room be just template-header-style links to the appropriate talk pages, so it in effect, becomes just a page of links? I like that concept a lot, actually. It would allow for much greater retention time before archiving the TR. That, in turn, would give much greater continuity, especially for seemingly unrelated discussions. --Connel MacKenzie T C 19:42, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

Something like that, yes. Actually, what I was saying is that we should make a new page as a "link depository", while keeping the Tea room strictly for broader discussions that don't belong on article talk pages. Or the other way round; don't know what would be the least confusing. —Vildricianus 20:16, 31 May 2006 (UTC)

• Note: the Grease pit is now one week old... I guess we'll need its first archiving in about ten days. — Vildricianus 20:00, 2 June 2006 (UTC)

Another idea: how about moving large discussions (more than three screens) to subpages when they are archived, and linking to it from a page very much alike Connel's Beer parlour archive index. Three lists perhaps: alphabetical, chronological and topical. We should definitely maintain such list if we just archive this page the "old way" as well. — Vildricianus 12:08, 5 June 2006 (UTC)

I think it'd be wise to keep large chunks of related topics on subpages. For instance the entire italbrac and cattag stuff (part of which is also in the BP archives) should be grouped together. — Vildricianus 16:35, 8 June 2006 (UTC)

I like the subpage ideas. Lots. But how to do them is quite an issue. My offline tools are offline. I need to take two or three weeks to just sit down and learn Python for real - but I won't have that kind of time for the next couple years.

Maybe something like User:Ingoolomo's talk page auto-subpager javascript would help?

--Connel MacKenzie T C 06:11, 9 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't see the issues. When the archiving time of a topic has come, you put it on a subpage. Also, see #Active subtopics; it could happen well before archiving time. As a matter of fact, perhaps "archiving" is not really applicable here. Ideas will always return, and it's better if they do so within an existing context than started again from scratch. Well-developed and discussed ideas, like the ones I mentioned above and probably a few more, should be subpaged and linked to from the top of this page, probably in a big pink intrusive box to annoy you :-). — Vildricianus 20:03, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

I don't think the idea of sub-paging by month was known when the BP archiving method was set up. But for WT:GP, I'd like to make one subpage for each month. This page would then become a list of the last three months (or less) sub-page things. The subpages would have a level ONE heading. And the "Add new topic" link at the very top could use {{CURRENTMONTH}} (or whatever is in fashion these days) to get to the proper sub-page. This page would then be edited only about once a month, while each month's conversations would have that entire month's history. Unlike the BP, no protection of the archive pages would be needed, as each conversation an (with a clever back link here or there) remain active as long as needed.

Whaddaya think? Can I start messing around with this idea? --Connel MacKenzie T C 20:17, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Clever. Please clarify that last bit. "Each conversation remains active as long as needed" ? Because the pages are shorter? Hmm. That means we have to remain on the lookout for posts to pages of months long gone by? — Vildricianus 22:05, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Support. I also suggest we acknowledge and support the option mentioned above for any resulting month page to fork off indexed topic-specific pages when their length so justifies. Rod (A. Smith) 22:01, 10 June 2006 (UTC)

Ah, yes, that would make it work, I think. --Connel MacKenzie T C 07:30, 11 June 2006 (UTC)

Well, sounds fine, except for one major disadvantage which I had in mind for this page, namely that things will be archived by date instead of by topic. — Vildricianus 15:11, 16 June 2006 (UTC)