User talk:Iamunknown/Thinktank/Staff lounge

There is plenty of talk now about consolidating the various "get help" pages (VIP, AN, etc) into a single centralized help page. If we do this, it would be an excellent first-step in sorting out the staff-lounge discussion. Essentially, we could use the staff-lounge as a high-visibility disambiguation page, and we could splinter off into topic-specific rooms (although I would favor a minimum number of such rooms). For instance, we could have:


 * Welcome to the staff lounge!
 * If you would like to request help from a staff member or administrator, see "Get Help Page".
 * If you would like to discuss site-wide issues please see "Staff Lounge/Wikibooks".
 * If you would like to share news with the community, see "Bulletin Board".
 * For general chat, see "Staff Lounge/Chat".
 * To post a complaint, an insult, or other negative message, press Ctrl+F5 and type your message into the box.

(The last part is a little joke, we probably won't include it). Either way, we would essentially break the staff lounge into 4 new destinations (which is better then 1, but not too many), two of which are likely to be on everybody's watchlists already. What do you think about this? --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 14:09, 18 January 2007 (UTC)


 * One thing that we need to remember is that most of the posts on staff lounge aren't from newbies looking for help (although we do get those kinds of posts too). What the staff lounge is most used for is a discussion area for seasoned members to discuss changes and post news. We use it as a place to announce other discussions in other places (RfA, important VfD, policies, etc). We could likely keep the main staff lounge page reserved for such announcements ("a new discussion is happening at..."), and use other pages for the actual discussions. That should help the process of keeping all the information centralized, but not overloading staff-lounge with all the actual discussion text. --Whiteknight (talk) (projects) 19:13, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Time for discussion
One of the key things about the process on Wikibooks, and something I hope we don't lose, is that we tend to take a bit more time to discuss issue in comparison to say Wikipedia. I hope that this is something that continues.

The proposal to try and split up the Staff Lounge into seperate areas, such as "Policy", "News", "Inter-project cooperation", and "Book development" might be a good idea for this reason alone. Certainly the Staff Lounge has become quite active and it is becoming increasingly important to try and clear out old discussions just so you aren't overwhelmed when you turn there.

Another alternative that could be done for especially larger discussions is to have that entire discussion moved to a sub-page for itself, with a link prominent on the "top" of the main Staff Lounge page. This would be done (for now) on an ad-hoc basis, and mainly for the more controversial topics, especially those that seem to be a recurring theme of discussion.

At this point what really needs to happen is for somebody to simply be bold and make the changes to the Staff Lounge. I don't see any major opposition to trying to do some reform, and discussion have been held in the past for trying to come up with some sort of archiving policy/procedure to help clean out some of the cruft. I don't think we are quite at the stage, however, of using a 'bot for doing the cleaning. --Rob Horning 16:49, 18 January 2007 (UTC)

Another direction
Look at what I've outlined here [User:Iamunknown/Staff_lounge#Approaching_from_a_different_angle] and try and match it to what we already have - AN, SL, Study Help desk and I would like to get in aspects of RFC. Any good? -- Herby talk thyme 18:12, 18 January 2007 (UTC)