Bulleted Threads Smell

Seen somewhere on Wiki:

"The usefulness of a page seems to decrease in direct proportion to the maximum level of indentation on the page."

I'm sure you've all seen pages where someone states a position

And then the original poster's position continues on, unindented, in the next paragraph. But by then, nobody has any clue what it was about, because several pages of discussion have intervened.

Pages like this become virtually impossible to ReFactor, except by writing TentativeSummary and blowing the whole discussion away. There is not enough context attached to each comment to move them around, and so IncrementalRefactoring? is impractical. Any attempt to tease apart the different threads leads to unintelligible gibberish, because the meaning of comments is totally dependent upon their position in the thread.

Some approaches to consider instead:


See ThreadMess, WikiSmell


CategoryWikiHelp CategoryWikiDiscussion?


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