Can You Refactora Live Thread

From DontMakePartTwo:

FrancisHwang (somewhat rhetorically) asks CanYouRefactoraLiveThread?, and reminds us that refactoring and contributing are not mutually exclusive modes.

Now, There be dragons. If you don't believe that, good luck to you, cause you'll need it. is also true. Just because it's possible doesn't mean it's easy; it's certainly not as easy as just pasting in opinion.

However, just because it's hard doesn't mean it's not desirable. According to FrancisScottFitzgerald?: The test of a first-rate intelligence is the ability to hold two opposed ideas in the mind at the same time, and still retain the ability to function. One should, for example, be able to see that things are hopeless and yet be determined to make them otherwise.

Perhaps the test of a first-rate WikiPage is the ability to do justice to two opposed ideas at the same time, and a good WikiZen (like a golfer replacing divots) can see that the task of contributing via refactoring may be difficult, yet be determined to do so anyway.

Remember also that some refactorings are much safer than others. Moving and extracting are relatively harmless, and they do quite a bit to help focus discussion. Line-level synthesis is much trickier, as is deletion. Personally I'd feel fairly safe doing moving and extracting to a live thread, but I'd leave synthesis & deletion 'til things have cooled down. ~ francis

If a person has a change of mind, or is persuaded to change, is the history important, or are there times when a simple deletion will add clarity to the discussion, rather than confuse and lengthen it with the opinion change left in place?

History is almost always useless. The WikiNow is what's important. Now, if some people want to write their own conversion stories -- "The story of how I thought X and came to believe Y instead" -- that's often great information. But we don't need to retain everything they thought and wrote here when they thought X. The signal-to-noise ratio on that stuff is usually quite low.

However, just because you've changed your mind doesn't mean that nobody still feels that way. So if you think your old comments might represent somebody today, better to keep them around. Deleting your signature would make sense, though.

One of the things I notice while refactoring is that a page is never really done. There's no such thing as stasis. A topic may look complete, but people will become more interested in adding their two cents once the page is cleaned up. And there are always newbies coming along eager to contribute, too, even if much of the extant Wiki community is tired of the subject.

It's essential to the process. There is no final consensus here, and there is no finished state. There isn't changing and unchanging. There's only the rate of change, and that's never zero. -- francis