Comments: metadata or forums?
I have noticed there are many useful writings that are difficult to find in tikiwiki.org, because they are in the comments.
I think that, ideally, comments should be Metadata, i.e. thoughts about the way the related page should be written.
They should not be Data, if you see what I mean. In Wikipedia comments are Metadata in that sense. They remain focused on modifications to bring to the main page. I observe that in tikiwiki.org comments often become forums, that is an interesting discussion with information in itself.
But they are not easy to find. You have to use Search to find them. You cannot navigate to them. It is as if in wikipedia there were rich encyclopedia articles hidden in the comments.
Maybe that is a "vice" that should be eradicated as soon as possible in tiki development. I don't have a complete solutions for the moment:
- Extend the Discuss into forums feature, make it possible to click and make a comment page a forum, when it has become a forum.
- Make Discuss into forums a default setting, and create a new category that would be apart from real forums, presented like another feature, a hybrid between forums and preparation of wiki pages, accessibles from commented pages, but also from forums-like navigation.
Or... in the other direction, invent ways si that comments CANNOT become a discussion... I don't know...