Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions

I have made a few tests on Talk:Sandbox with a mock discussion. Nothing too complicate: there is a proposal, three users answering to the proposal and one user endorsing opinion of another user.

The problem is that new threading model make any non-linear discussion unreadable. Once there is a deviation from linearity, that's the deviation that becomes linear, while the main thread moves on the next level. In the cases I have shown the discussion becomes difficult to read (and even more difficult to summarise). In fact this threading model is simply counter-intuitive and does the opposite to what you would suppose. That's sad as this could have been a real discussion and this could have meant that Gdańsk would become Danzig (nothing personal, just a famous edit war, sorry).

See phab:T93883.

In that example, the problem comes from Encyclopaedist003's position being ambiguous, as the "your reasoning" and "this spelling" may refer to any of the positions stated so far in the discussion, and because it doesn't use the traditional "support" or "oppose" !vote. How is this fault of the threading model?

In that situation the proper thing to do would be to ask this user for further clarification; such ambiguous comment should never be taken into account to decide consensus in a real move discussion.

The comment was a bit intentionally vague. The discussion was rather real, it was inspired from a real discussion on ukwiki village pump with the following structure:

Initial suggestion

Answer1

Comment on answer1

Answer2

Answer3

• Conclusion

This is a very simple threading structure (max. 2 levels) and is very common for discussions. The problem of Flow threading is that a) comment can become vague because of being misplaced; b) logical order of comments is broken.

That assumes that there "is" a logical ordering of comments where every post is a direct reply to exactly one previous comment in the thread, and that you can always tell which one is the parent post. This is a convention in talk pages that is not at all obvious (making it difficult to newcomers to tell what's going on), and it's not always true.

BTW, the structure of that particular example conversation in your post would be exactly the same in the new hierarchical model, except with one less indentation level in all the answers and comments.