Help:Discussions

Every page on OpenWiki has a Discussion, reached from the tab at the top left of the page. It is where you raise problems with an article, propose changes, and ask questions.

This is the one part of OpenWiki that is deliberately not a wiki. On most wikis, discussion happens on a page that everyone edits: you scroll to the bottom, add your comment by hand, sign it by typing a code, and hope nobody mangles it. That has real costs — people edit-conflict with each other, replies land in the wrong place, and anyone can alter what you appear to have said.

Here, a discussion is a set of topics, and a topic is a set of messages. Each message is its own record:

• it carries its own author and timestamp, recorded automatically — there is nothing to sign;
• it cannot be edited by anyone except the person who wrote it;
• replies attach to the message they answer, so a conversation keeps its shape;
• two people posting at once never conflict.

Start a topic

Open the discussion for a page and use Start a new topic. Give it a subject that says what it is about — "Neuron count needs a source" rather than "problem".

Reply

Open a topic and write in the box at the bottom. To answer one particular message, press Reply on it; your message is then shown attached to it.

Edit

You can rewrite your own messages. They are marked edited afterwards, so the record stays honest.

Delete

You can remove your own messages; administrators can remove any. A removed message leaves a marker rather than disappearing, so a conversation does not lose its thread.

You do not need an account. A message posted without one is signed Anonymous, followed by the IP address it was posted from — the same way unregistered edits are attributed on Wikipedia.

That address does two things:

• It identifies the message as yours. Come back from the same address and the message is marked you, and you can edit or delete it, exactly as an account holder can. Nobody posting from a different address can touch it.
• It is public. Anyone reading the discussion sees it.

If you would rather not publish an address, register a name: messages from an account record the account and no address. Addresses also change — if yours changes, older messages of yours stop being editable, because the only claim you had on them was the address.

Site administrators can run OpenWiki with OPENWIKI_SHOW_ANON_IP=0, which shows a short pseudonym such as #4b7c instead of the address while keeping everything else the same. See OpenWiki:Privacy policy.

The person who started a topic, and any administrator, can close it. A closed topic stays readable but takes no new replies. Close a topic when the question is settled — not to end an argument you are losing.

• Problems with an article: something wrong, unclear, missing or unsourced.
• Proposals, when a change is big enough that it is worth asking first.
• Requests for an edit to a protected page, which anyone can make here even when they cannot edit the page itself.
• Working out a disagreement, instead of reverting each other repeatedly.

They are not for general chat, and not for material that belongs in the article.

Special:Discussions lists recent messages across the whole site, and every page with a conversation on it. The discussion tab on any page shows how many topics it has.