Topic on Talk:Structured Discussions

@Jdforrester (WMF): I think your edit is wrong in nearly all it's aspects.

1. Of course a talk page has textual content, nothing else. It's a wiki page like every other wiki page as well. They are just not only encyclopedic content pages, but pages for discussions and article improvements.
2. Talk pages have a structure, everybody can see that they are structured: They have headlines and sub-headlines, they have indentation and signatures, they have a clear structure for everyone to see; everyone but machines that is. If you reduce the universal word structure to the very small aspect of fully machine readability, say so clearly in making this restriction of the word known.
3. VE on talk pages is of course possible, in the thread you tried a hostile close on on the VE-Flowpage it was shown (by Diego Moya in his enWP sandbox nearly exactly a year ago) that editing with VE on talk pages is indeed possible. Why do you continue with the lie that it is fundamentally impossible?

How do you think trust towards the foundation can be rebuild, if you go on with this extremely biased presentation of Flow? Grüße vom Sänger ♫^(Reden) 18:49, 18 September 2017 (UTC)

As Flow cannot work with normal linking in the headlines, here's the proper link: this edit

I agree with the above, and let me also add that I see a number of things wrong with this sentence that was added: "Though they may appear in parts to be "semi-structured" to expert users through the cunning abuse of bullet lists and/or definition lists, this is unintelligible to software."

• I don't know what "expert users" means here - if there's a page with progressive indentation of different people's comments, I would think a 6-year-old could see the structure there and understand its meaning.
• I don't understand "cunning abuse" either. Was ":" originally meant just for glossary definitions? Even if it was, it clearly was quickly adopted as general-purpose indentation syntax. I see nothing hacky about its use for that in talk pages.
• I would love to know what the purpose would be of some theoretical software that could analyze talk page discussions. Let's say we can tell for sure that some user's comment was a direct response to another user's comment. So what? What could possibly be done with that information?