dKosopedia talk:Thread summary

From dKosopedia

This isn't about history, this is about reporting the consensus of a given community from a third party perspective. Even a diary takes a pulse (when replied to) and polls start to give you a rough idea of the community opinion with dozens of votes. Main threads give a wide perspective that is nonetheless still radially to a basic progressive perspective. I often use diaries to poll with this intent, to sound the ideas of dKos. I find that threaded conversations start to yield patterns that can be broken down into a set of common positions. So thread summeries if placed here are really snapshots on the state of common positions as seen through the eyes, of course, of a particular observer.

I would be interested in having a record of positions on certain threads because by comparing such summaries as threads revisit the same topic over time. I would imagine I would only do this for the most significant threads.

It will be controversial to suggest that a summary of arguments found in The Infamous Merc Statement should be the first such thread summary.

My hope is that by summarizing threads, then summarizing summaries, we condense out fundamental viewpoints which we are then able to state succinctly.

I note, by consulting the "Page history" link, that the preceding contribution (of 4 'graphs) was made at 12:36, 16 May 2004 by User:Pyrrho.

I moved it from ThreadSummary to a related talk page because it is a proposal rather than content of a "political encyclopedia".

On reflection, i am going to move it yet again, because it isn't a proposal about content, but about how to go about generating content: the summaries will be raw material for drawing conclusions about issues, and they will in turn (if I understand the concept) help craft consensus statements about the issues discussed in the respective threads. That is the function of pages in the namespace

dKosepedia talk:

and the thread summaries would belong in the

Talk:

namespace. E.g., the summary of The Infamous Merc Statement thread would be on the page

Talk:Mercenary

which is the page for discussing what the content of

Mercenary

should be. The page

dKosepedia talk:Thread summary

will have the best available statement of how thread summaries are supposed to work.

Namespace issues aside, I changed the titles after the colons as follows, following WP policies (which may not be entirely suitable here, but have (with the exception of NPOV) been adopted here for the time being):

• Spaces between words in titles
• First word of a title is capitalized, on the page the title names; links to the page should spell it with the first word upper- or lower-cased according to how the link fits best into the sentence containing it, and the MediaWiki engine translates it to upper-case when it searches for the page to link to.
• Subsequent words of a title are lower case, unless the expression is normally upper-cased in running text. For instance, Democratic Party because that is a proper name for one organization, but Democratic activist, because you would write "Joe Blow is a Democratic activist", and only use a captital A if you were ghostwriting the autobio Democratic Activist by Joseph Blow.

The common purpose of all those policies IMO suits here as it does in WP, because it makes the links easier to write in a way that doesn't make the running text that includes them awkward.

--Iks(TkPg) 23:17, 25 Jun 2004 (PDT)

Oh, yeah, and

• Titles are singular nouns or noun phrases, whenever feasible. One of the reasons for that is that almost never could the plural title be used to link to the page, when a singular fits the sentence, without a fuss. If the title were "Corporations" you'd have to use this markup

[[corporations|corporation]]

for writing

Microsoft is a predatory corporation.

But when the title is "Corporation", this much simpler markup

[[corporation]]s

yields

Can we apply to corporate-death penalty to predatory corporations?

Which accounts for why, finally, ThreadSummaries became dKosopedia talk:Thread summary

--Iks(TkPg) 23:37, 25 Jun 2004 (PDT)