Forum:The Forum and the Portal

This is a proposal to overhaul our current central discussion system with the aim of streamlining discussions even further and cleaning up (what I would describe as) the sort of mess that has been created by introducing the Forum but not changing our other discussion areas to accommodate it.

The Forum is immensely useful and makes larger discussions on the wiki infinitely smoother, but with its introduction we neglected to actually do anything to the Community Portal. While there was a discussion about what to do with the Portal, nothing actually came of it other than maintaining the status quo (keeping the Portal around), mostly due to people being in disagreement about what to do with it. Admittedly I also supported keeping the Portal around, but my opinion has since changed, so I'd like to go through my idea for what we could do with the Portal.

Before though, I want to explain the issue with our current Forum and Portal system. That issue being that the Portal is practically useless. New users are encouraged to use the Forum instead of the Portal because when they look at the sidebar, "Forum" is far more recognisable as a discussion place than "Community portal". This is true in theory and in practise, as we've had a sizable amount of random posts on the Forum that should in theory be on the Portal. Experienced users are encouraged to use the Forum instead of the Portal because they know that the Forum is immensely more effective if you want people to respond to your topic. Also, the line between "general" and "in-depth" wiki discussion is blurry enough to the point where as long as it's not an irrelevant help question, people won't care about if your post is "in-depth" enough for the forum, meaning these random posts on the Forum are never moved to the Portal.

Because of all of this, the Portal is practically useless, despite theoretically having a use case.

However, in my opinion, have two separate discussion areas like this is actually useful and could work well. It's just that this current system doesn't work to me, so now let's get onto my idea.

This idea has a couple individual parts to it, so bear with me and do read all of them.

The Community space (or as I'll be calling it, "the Space"), would be the same as the current Portal main page, with two changes:

1. It would act as a landing page by having a large section at the top of the page that directs users to each discussion place on-wiki. Those places being the two Forums (woah, spoilers) and the Admin Noticeboard. Ideally this would be fancier than just some big bold text explaining where to go, we could present the options like we present games on the main page.
2. The Portal/Space talk page would no longer act as a central discussion area. It could become a talk page for only discussing the Space, or it could be archived completely, either way, it would no longer be a central discussion area like it is now.

"Why the rename?" I think a slight rename is warranted if we were to overhaul the use of this important page. "Community space" sounds nice and makes sense to me, but if people want to suggest other names that's perfectly fine. If people don't think a rename is needed that's perfectly fine too, it is not that important to my idea.

Because the Forum is incredibly active, and closing the Portal talk page would direct more people to the Forum, I think it is beneficial to continue having two separate discussion areas on-wiki. So I suggest that we have two forums, and give each Forum its own use case.

The first forum, the "Proposals Forum", would be used only for posts that propose something specific that is implemented/occurs once the post receives enough support.

The second forum, the "Discussions Forum", would be the general discussion area for the wiki. Essentially the Portal talk page revived in the form of a Forum, but made more useful due to its expanded scope. Anything that isn't a specific proposal would belong here (assuming it is wiki-related, I don't think we want a completely general discussion area on-wiki). Even in-depth discussions could go here if they are open ended are aren't a specific proposal, such as the scope of the community portal discussion we had recently.

I think this split into proposals and discussions is the simplest and least confusing split we could do, it gives a clear purpose to both forum types, much clearer than just "in-depth" and "general" at least.

To simplify things and prevent incredibly long Forum topic names (such as "Minecraft Wiki:Discussion Forum/The Forum and the Portal"), I suggest we have a dedicated Forum namespace. The namespace would contain all individual forum posts and the main forums themselves (they'd be named "Forum:Proposals" for example). This certainly isn't necessary, but I view it like a quality of life change, and I think quality of life is valuable.

- Harristic / Talk 👁 Image
16:12, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

This is a long winded proposal with multiple different parts, so I encourage people to say which specific parts of the proposal they support or oppose. Let your responses have nuance. I, of course, 👁 Image
 support all of the suggestions as the proposer. Also, if you have any further ideas, please suggest them. - Harristic / Talk 👁 Image
16:12, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

I 👁 Image
 Oppose the two separate forums where one is for discussions and the other for proposals. This is exactly the same as we have right now, as far as the problem goes. Without identifying what the problem then really is, I want to point out that proposals also need to be discussed. Just like this one. So that will not "sort" the forums, it will be another split of locations where we keep discussions. And that is the problem in the first place, your concern about the fact we have multiple eligible places for basically the same thing. I would not mind two separate forums however, if you can manage to split them into two purposes that do not have this problem. Such as on feedback sites there's often place for suggestions as well as issues, as these can generally be distinguished easily (but is only an analogy). - Jack McKalling (talk) 16:29, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

I presented the definitions of the two current discussion places and the two proposed discussion places rather clearly I believe, so I'm not sure how you could believe that my proposed split is the same as the current one. "In-depth discussion" and "proposals" are not synonyms by any definition, and my proposed split eliminates confusion unlike the current one which finds it in abundance. Proposals are a form of discussion, yet they are a specific and abundant form that can be easily and simply split from all other types. Your issue with my idea would be solved by renaming the Discussions Forum to General Discussions Forum, which I believe demonstrates how it is a non-issue. The fact that proposals are a type of discussion is not a tangible problem, the issue with the Portal is not that they are both for discussions, the problem is and always has been that the split of which discussions go where is not at all clear and is incredibly blurry, which leads to it being useless. - Harristic / Talk 👁 Image
16:42, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

If you want to make two places clear and distinct from each other, one cannot contain the same thing as the other. That's all. Proposals need discussions, so having the other called discussions doesn't make it better organized. When someone finds the discussions forum, they have to immediately know if that one is what they're looking for without having to analyze the other first (proposal forum). Leaving this unsolved reintroduces a similar issue to the community portal being under used in favour of the forums, because it would still (potentially) leave all proposals and discussions on the discussion forum. Lets just realize that both forums are supposed to have discussions anyway, because that's what a forum is for anyway, so what purpose underneath a discussion are they supposed to represent, and call them by that. - Jack McKalling (talk) 16:59, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

The problem with this problem is I don't believe there's a better way to do this split. I find a split almost necessary because, assuming we close the Portal as a central discussion location, we are left with a single very active discussion area that harbours every type of discussion, bar page-specific stuff and things that belong on the noticeboard. This was kind of fine before with the Portal, because the discussion system on the Portal was a lot less effective meaning less discussions occurred in the first place. But that same "everything in one place" system isn't going to work if you have a new discussion area that evidently is far more effective and active.

So if we (hopefully) agree that some kind of split is beneficial, what other option for a split is there? There definitely are other options, but I think those other options would include having more than two forums, and feel as though that's best avoided. I also think that in most other options you are going to be left needing a type of forum that is just for "general discussion". But the existence of a general discussion forum creates the issue that you are describing.

(The following just a lot of random brainstorming honestly, apologies). Perhaps you could have a forum for proposals, help, and chatting. While chatting is almost a synonym of discussing, it implies a casual setting, which I think removes (to an extent that I think would be enough) the overlap with the proposals forum. And the use of a "help forum" is rather clear and shouldn't overlap with other forum. But is there really enough topics that could be considered "chatting"? In-depth discussions that aren't proposals would practically belong there, but the name implies they don't belong there, because they certainly aren't simple chats. I could only see a "chatting forum" being active if we allowed non-wiki discussion there, and that sounds like a no-go. Is the issue really just figuring out a suitable name at that point? I also have the admittedly somewhat baseless worry that people wouldn't like even the idea of three forums.- Harristic / Talk 👁 Image
18:03, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

I 👁 Image
 Oppose splitting the forum per Jack. While I see the need to overhaul how the portal currently works, I don't think creating more sperate places to discuss is the right move.

Regarding the Forum namespace, the only advantage seems to be shorter page names. This doesn't seem worth it to me, we also don't have a namespace for Projects.

If the goal is to keep the list of active forum posts low, I would propose this: Rather than just being "active" or "closed", a forum post can be in a few states, also using categories. For example there could be a "Proposal forum" category, a "Question forum", "Stale forum", etc. There would need to be guidelines on when to move a forum post to a different state. If this doesn't adress the problems with the current system I'd be interested to hear why.

I still 👁 Image
 Support improving a central community space/portal which links to forums, admin noticeboard, projects, etc and explains each use case. — Misode (talk) 20:20, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

That is indeed what a "portal" is for in my opinion. Central place that can direct you to the right place. Regardless of whatever name it gets. I'd totally see a split working if it were about getting help ("Help" or "Questions") and the other offering solutions ("Proposals" or "Ideas"). That's the two we've been experiencing that people go for. I don't think we need "stale", we can just archive topics right? Anyways, those two would work already. If you want to just chat you shouldn't be on the wiki. - Jack McKalling (talk) 20:56, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

👁 Image
 Strong support - I think splitting the forum makes things much simpler, and honestly all of these sound great to me. When I first started as a wiki editor, I had no idea how discussions worked. It took me months before I dared touch any discussions, it was too confusing to use and unintuitive. Under this proposal, I think discussions and proposals could become better integrated into the wiki, and less of an afterthought. - BD (talk) 01:55, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

For me, I'm 👁 Image
 Neutral to a rename, I'm fine with the name "Community Portal", but I'd think it would be nice to have a rename. I 👁 Image
 strongly oppose splitting the forum, although there could be positives to it, it may get confusing in my mind. I would give 👁 Image
 Support to making a namespace, as it would just make life easier. -- ThatOneWolf ^{Time for a chat?_{See my edits?}} 15:59, 22 January 2024 (UTC)

👁 Image
 No support for split and community portal deletion. If we anyway are going to have 2 disscussion areas, then why convert the communty portsl to a forum format? There aren't any really big advantages like the ones we had to create this one. However, I 👁 Image
 Support changing the name of the community portal - it's not exactly that intutive of a name. The only reason we have the name as 'Community Potal' is because that is the standard wiki discussion page name, but then again, we have two discussion areas. Removing one entirely would defeat the purpose of creating the forum in the first place, so I think we should rename the community portal to something like "Discussion Dimension"(mc ref) or simply just have the link on the siderbar say "discuss".--
.👁 Image
.Vdiu | Talk | Contributions . 10:36, 1 February 2024 (UTC)

This is a section for suggesting/discussing any further ideas that I haven't mentioned already. - Harristic / Talk 👁 Image
16:12, 18 January 2024 (UTC)

Maybe, we could implement something like a gameplay discussion portal or forum, or a section of the community portal designed for gameplay questions. I have seen many forum posts asking about a feature of the game, and I know they shouldn't be on the forum, but I can't say they belong on the portal either, as there really isn't a place for them there either. Therefore, this would give them a place to direct their comment to, and that would clear up a good section of the forum for more important discussions about the wiki itself, in my opinion. -- ThatOneWolf ^{Time for a chat?_{See my edits?}} 15:52, 22 January 2024 (UTC)