[WikiEN-l] Eschatology and Wikipedia

[Carcharoth]

On Thu, Dec 23, 2010 at 3:18 AM, Stephanie Daugherty
<sdaugherty at gmail.com> wrote:

> Of further concern to me is that we have far exceeded the limits of a
> wiki as an effective collaboration platform. Collaboration at small
> scale remains possible but talk pages dont scale well at all to tens
> of thousands of users.

Most articles don't have tens of thousands of users. Most only have
tens to fifties. Only the very largest discussions need to involve all
active users, and even there the numbers taking part are not in the
tens of thousands.

> Further the software was never designed to be used in the way we use
> it to implement process on wiki. Complex template based processes and
> conversations based around heavy template usage are unnatural,
> inefiicent, error prone, and have too steep a learning curve for
> newcomers.

I agree templates can be confusing, but they provide great
flexibility. If you are going to move to a different system, it has to
be one that editors can make changes to and not rely on developers to
make requested changes.

> These issues are critical to fix if we are to scale but there is so
> much inertia that i fear it would only be possible if changes were
> forced. There are a lot of well established editors that actually
> benefit from the status quo - the complexity and confusion inherent to
> policy process and discussion tend to create a sort of inner circle of
> editors that can effectively leverage the situation to their advantage
> through the combination of knowledge and persistance.

Most policy discussion and process doesn't affect articles,
surprisingly enough. Not directly, anyway. To be able to edit articles
well, all you really need is a general sense of how things work (using
examples from other articles that are clearly good examples), a
willingness to learn and discuss with others, some good sources to
work with, a basic ability to write and organise your thoughts, being
able to balance what different sources are saying, and some common
sense.

Everything else is instruction creep, but often useful instruction
creep as long as you don't pay too much attention to it. Pay attention
to it when you need to, but at other times just use common sense and
ask yourself if what you are doing will improve, or lead to an
improvement in, an article or set of articles.

Carcharoth