User:Iamunknown/Thinktank/Staff lounge

Before the the most recent archival, the staff lounge was 312 kilobytes and very overwhelming. Currently most issues are hammered out (at least in part) there. I think that something needs to be done. Here I am going to hammer out ideas about what could be done. I invite you to contribute. Please do not remove anything; instead, if for some reason you wish to change something, strike it out. Discuss on the talk page.

Brainstorm

What is posted at the staff lounge?

• Policy-related text
  • Formerly "policy of the week"
  • Calls for discussion concerning mature proposals
• General Wikibooks-related questions
• Questions directed from the English Embassy
• Calls for help (clean up, blocking open proxies, etc.)

This may well be addressed by the postings on the RfA page for and "general" request for help page

What should be posted in the staff lounge?

Status quo

• Nearly everything is posted at the staff lounge
• NOT desirable IMO (HT)

How could it change?

• Decentralise the staff lounge. A user would go to {[Wikibooks:Staff lounge]], see a list of the descriptions of the satellite pages, and then go there.

  Problem: then there is no place of maximum visibility

• Have a <input></input> box to create a sub-page with the topic title as the sub-page name.

  Problem: then users would have to add each sub-page to their watchlist

  Question: would it require an extra step to include the sub-page into the staff lounge?

• My big bugbear is navigation - folks just don't know where to look and (by comparison) the Staff Lounge is easy to find (I asked quite a few questions there when I started!). We really do need to radically improve navigation at the top of SL and then make sure the info gets carried thro to other places where navigation is found including the welcome template. In passing I feel we should decommission ViP in favour of WB:AN - nothing like as much of it these days - and try and make more use of the WB:AN (might be worth placing messages on admin talk pages to make sure they are actually watching it) - scratch that for the new "request for help" page if that gets off the ground!
  • <ramble> (A derivative of the 1st one but with max visibility depending on from where) Could we have a page between the staff lounge and the staff lounge for real. So from some places clicking on the staff lounge would get you a "what do you really want?" page and here is where to go? Obviously there would be issues about which links got the intervening page but ...</ramble>
  • One possibility: decomission the staff lounge altogether, create a header on top of the main page talk page with the "what do you really want?" navigation which would send you to WB:AN, help request, etc. Or the main page talk page header could just be the staff lounge included as a header.

• Maintain the massive staff lounge but create two templates to wrap around the larger discussion which will minimise them, and then if you want to take part in the discussion, you would just maximise it by clicking an "expand" link

  Problem: not scalable. The staff lounge keeps getting bigger, and doing that will only make it appear to be small.

  Problem: does not address the fact that many conversations which are in no way related to each other are being forced into one page.

Approaching from a different angle

What is it that folk are looking for help with (assuming we have a main "help" page)

• "I need help with my layout"
• "I need help with content"
• "I need to know what is acceptable"
• "I need an administrator"
• "I've found a vandal"
• "I need help with repetitive tasks"
• - feel free to add
• Finally if you can't see what you might want above, please ask in the Staff Lounge