Seen somewhere on Wiki:
"The usefulness of a page seems to decrease in direct proportion to the maximum level of indentation on the page."
I'm sure you've all seen pages where someone states a position
- But someone just has to correct it
- Which makes the original poster jump in to defend it
- Which leads to a heated flamewar
- Which is finally resolved when someone posts a long, detailed exposition referencing several academic papers.
- This exposition will frequently be several paragraphs in length, and generally be a good summary of the topic.
- Yet nobody can read it, because each paragraph is indented four levels under its own bullet point.
- And people feel the need to respond to Every Single Bullet Point.
- Even when the software can't support another nesting level.
- I agree
- And they totally interrupt the flow of the quality discussion.
- Which leads to a heated flamewar
- Which makes the original poster jump in to defend it
And then the original poster's position continues on, unindented, in the next paragraph. But by then, nobody has any clue what it was about, because several pages of discussion have intervened.
Pages like this become virtually impossible to ReFactor, except by writing TentativeSummary and blowing the whole discussion away. There is not enough context attached to each comment to move them around, and so IncrementalRefactoring is impractical. Any attempt to tease apart the different threads leads to unintelligible gibberish, because the meaning of comments is totally dependent upon their position in the thread.
Some approaches to consider instead:
- ConvertThreadModeToDocumentMode
- CorrectInsteadOfCriticize
- ReplaceQuestionWithAnswer
- SplitByTopicNotByOpinion
See ThreadMess, WikiSmell
CategoryWikiHelp CategoryWikiDiscussion