Talk:Barack Obama/Organisation

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Hello folks, Im one of the regular mediators. I anticipate much more discussion on this article, and as such I want to try an experiment for a high-traffic controversial topic talk page, (this seems to qualify). The idea is to organize the talk page according to a topic-based system, archiving the discussion in a topical way, rather than just in a linear way.

The first thing to do would be to work out a system for doing this. The basic system would be a topical list at the top, which link to subpages titled after the major issues relevant to this article. There are of course some potential problems with people editing other peoples comments - the important rule must be to be principled and consistent - making linkages to specific archive sections.

Im curious how this sounds to people. Please offer your feedback at Talk:Barack Obama/Organisation. -Ste|vertigo 09:08, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

This sounds like an interesting and fruitful idea - if the legitimate purpose of a talk page is to discuss the article itself, a talk page could be organized to mirror the organization of the underlying article at a given point in real time. This setup could enable relatively rapid and efficient links between different sections of a lengthy article and the relevant sections of an even more lengthy talk page.

Of course the underlying article's organization might change drastically after the article's talk page was reorganized. No solution is perfect. Bigturtle 22:36, 19 February 2007 (UTC)

Archiving process

Hi, as a WikiGnome and since we are warming up on 99 archives, I would like to help put the "Topic-based archive" into practice. Keeping Wikipedia:Talk_page_guidelines and Wikipedia:Refactoring_talk_pages in mind...here is what I propose. (I figure on giving it a couple days before I actually start for discussion). Also, this section is open for any edits. -- Mjquin_id (talk) 01:47, 25 January 2009 (UTC)

1. Start with Archive #1 - move "unique" discussion points to appropriate "Topic"
2. If no topic area fits; either:
   1. create one (if archive-search reveals more than 10-20 discussion)
   2. OR move into misc; which will be structured by "YYYY-MM".
3. as we clean out a page; we would just leave it empty (Hoping to re-use; see later)
4. I would like to bump the archive size to 200K or 250K (Currently 150K)
5. hope that we can stay ahead of the numerical archive; when we have clean out at least 25; move the archiver back to 1 (with the larger size we should beat it to 99).

Edit/add anything you can think of directly above.

While I'm sure this is well-intentioned, I would ask that nothing be done until and unless the proposal is well-understood and agreed to by the regular editors of the page - not just a couple of days, but as long as is needed to decide if we want to proceed. The talk archives are large, but they are searchable and indexed, and mostly they are chronologically true to how the discussions took place. If I understand this correctly, the proposal would entail cutting them up and redistributing comments by theme, and I am concerned that this would destroy the ability to find something based on memory of approximately when it took place or in what context. I'm more of a purist - archives to me are more useful when they more or less mirror what actually happened, as another way of finding the data needed. I have no problem with improved indexing, and would welcome it - but I would prefer to see the archives remain intact and true to the history. Of course I may be misunderstanding this - if so, please enlighten me. (For example, if you're proposing creating a parallel archive by theme, that would be fine with me - as long as there continued to be a chronological archive.) Thanks for your interest in improving this article and the usefulness of its history, but please wait for discussion. Tvoz/talk 04:37, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

I believe that the chronological archives (1... whatever) should remain as is, while topical archives should be created in addition to them, as has happened on other talk archives, where the two types of archives exist in parallel. 76.66.196.229 (talk) 06:15, 29 January 2009 (UTC)

Parallel archives may work, alternately, can we simply create an archive index page? We could create entries by topic, with each link could go directly to the section archived. For example: Abortion - 12.3, 57.13, 67.2, where it's archive and section directly linked? In fact, i'd wager that if done in a text program, some bot or python type app could be built to grab the actual URLS and write them into the index, saving someone a fat load of cut n pasting. A single index page, though large, would be far more centralized than parallel indexes, and could be split into a-m and n-z if needed. ThuranX (talk) 06:50, 4 February 2009 (UTC)

Comments

Isn't Obama the first half Black and half White President?

14:57, 24 January 2009 user:24.60.70.52

this comment was transferred from the template page 76.66.198.171 (talk) 03:08, 28 January 2009 (UTC)

Should these be taken from:
Background · Illinois Senate · US Senate Political positions · Public image · Family 2008 primaries · Obama–Biden campaign Transition · Inauguration · Presidency

03:18, 25 January 2009 user:Mjquin id

this comment was transferred from the template page 76.66.198.171 (talk) 03:08, 28 January 2009 (UTC)