[Wikipedia-l] Metacomments

[Daniel Mayer]

On Thursday 03 October 2002 06:22 pm, you wrote:
> IMO:
> Some metacomments ("More needs to be written on this aspect.")
> have a place, and can be very useful to readers as well as writers.
> Others ("This is based on material from an unnamed 1911 encyclopedia.")
> can safely be relegated to [[Talk:]], if that.
>
>
> -- Toby

I'm not sure about the 1911 part since that tag in effect saying that the 
data may be out of date and/or biased. However, in general I do not like 
meta-tags (esp. WikiProject ones). 

As a matter of fact, earlier today I had to explain to a frantic newbie that 
they didn't have to get permission to edit a WikiProject London article or 
any WikiProject article for that matter. The newbie simply saw an edit 
summary in the history of the page that read "WikiProject London framework" 
and also saw the talk page which said "This page is part of the [[WikiProject 
London]]: please add information about this area to this article" (this was 
on one of the dozens of WikiProject London entries where I moved the 
WikiProject tag to the talk page - apparently that wasn't enough in this 
case). 

I went on to explain that the only people who are in any way bound by a 
particular WIkiProject's standards are the people who have agreed to be part 
of the WikiProject. Everyone else should feel free to add or edit articles 
the way they see fit and if that does not conform to a WikiProject's 
standards in a radical way then members of that project can reformat the 
additions to work best for their project. Of course knowingly going against a 
WikiProject for combative reasons is still bad form (if you want to change 
the format you should try to convince the WikiProject members that it is a 
good idea).

In short; newbies should only have to worry about where the edit button is - 
everything else will come in time.   

-- Daniel Mayer (aka mav)