Forum:Draughting Table

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A usefull new area, bigger than a sandbox but not ready for wiki inclusion.

The Draughting Table

Users are comming up with great ideas that need fleshing out by other, more experienced contributors. The problem is they are posting them to the wiki as articles when the pages are not suffiiciently constructed to do so. These pages are quickly marked for deletion.

examples: Inconsistencies and Retcons and it's talk page, A DWU cross-continuity and it's talk page, and my own idea on running gags and such

We need a place where such works in progress can be posted so as to give them time to be worked over, improved, and flesh out. The authors of all three are actively looking for help as to content, parameters, better ideas and so on. I don't know if the sandbox is such a place, so, I'm proposing some sort of Draughting Table for works in progress or for users proposing new and original pages such as the ones mentioned above.

I don't know if such a place exits or if it simply a matter of stickering a "WORK IN PROGRESS" tag on the full article page. If neither of these suffice a Draughting Table would be a very usefull area for good ideas to get turned into new, creative, usefull and appropriate articles for this wiki. --Stillnotginger 06:03, March 2, 2010 (UTC)

Can these pages not just be a Howling:The Howling topic(s)? --Tangerineduel 14:19, March 2, 2010 (UTC)

I don't know enough to answer. On an inital survey of sample pages I thik yes they can. Such a solution is still lacking a little bit, mostly because of semantics or labelling. Right now I don't know of a distinction that can be made so that a Howling entry can be clearly marked as a page under construction. Perhaps one of those boxes would be enough of a fix, e.g. "this page is a stub" or "this page is marked for deletion". A large banner across the top of the page saying "This is a page under construction" or "This page requires fleshing out before posting", or something like that, would go a long way to assuage an author that his forum entry is meant to be a potential article an all edits should reflect this AND that the related discussion page is for comments, helps, suggestions, etc...--Stillnotginger 14:40, March 2, 2010 (UTC)

Another template like the Template:Inuse which could be created and used on these pages. --Tangerineduel 14:43, March 2, 2010 (UTC)

Yes, exactly something like that. One or two new templates would be excellent; "page under construction" and "page requiring development, input appreciated" jump to mind as possibilities. The latter should certainly invite people to help out in any way with posts to the relevant discussion page. If such templates were to become available then the articles can exist outside of the forum but it is understood they are net yet intended as a full wiki contribution. This will allow room for good ideas to grow into a valuable article, yet at the same time be open to positive or negative reaction.

I think the examples provided in the original post are all pages that belong under these proposed templates. Even if initial reactions are negative the author still has room to incorporate suggestions and germinate seeds without screams for deletion. --Stillnotginger 16:04, March 2, 2010 (UTC)

On Wikipedia (at least back when I used to edit regularly), the first step for such pages was to create them under your user space. If enough people got involved, it could be moved somewhere else, and then eventually become a real page, but keeping it under the user page made it clear who was organizing the effort.

The procedure for creating one goes something like this:

• In the appropriate forum, mention something like, "I'm working on a page called User:Stillnotginger/Running Gags and would appreciate some input."
• That whole User:blahblah thing is enclosed in brackets, so it becomes a redlink.
• You click that redlink and create the page.
• People contribute, and you decide where to go from there (to a forum subspace, straight to live, to /dev/null, whatever).

It worked pretty well, but I don't know if there are technical and/or community reasons it wouldn't work here. --99.20.129.165 10:41, March 3, 2010 (UTC)