[Intlwiki-l] [Wikipedia-l] embassies and diplomats (fwd)

[Brion VIBBER]

Daniel Mayer wrote:
> On Thursday 26 September 2002 12:01 pm, Brion wrote:
>>My experience with Meta has been that I check it somewhere between very
>>rarely and never, which makes it useless for me for discussion or site
>>announcements. On the other hand, the wikis I participate in *editing* I
>>check rather regularly (en, eo quite frequently, fr at least few times a
>>week; I check de for the bug reports page), and so I'm much more likely
>>to notice big news / help requests / policy discussions there. Likewise
>>the mailing lists (eg intlwiki-l) come directly to my inbox once I've
>>subscribed, so it's tough to ignore them.
> 
> Sorry Brion, but your logic here fails me (chicken and the egg scenario). The 
> Meta is practically useless for what it was made for because nobody uses it 
> for much of anything but a dumping ground of POV material. So by ignoring it, 
> you are extending its uselessness.

Is that why it's useless, or do people use it that way _because_ it's 
useless for what it was made for? Can you really say you know the answer?

> I really like the idea of having the meta be the neutral ground for all the 
> different Wikipedia projects and I am glad to see that several alternate 
> homepages in different languages have already popped-up. This trend should be 
> encouraged. Why not have the same setup for the Embassy pages?

Because people need to be able to _find_ the multilingual meta paradise 
first! That means having a page on your local wiki which can link to it 
and report on important issues that have come up there that people 
should check out... and that page, by any name, is the embassy. I see no 
conflict here.

 > Isn't this /exactly/ what the meta was made for?

I always got the impression it was for pointing kooks at to keep them 
out of our hair on the encyclopedic wiki. If we're all watching it, 
where will we put them now? ;)

> If the software made it possible for people to see changes made to Metapedia 
> in their own language's Recent Changes then I can forsee much more activity 
> over at the Meta. 

Seriously though, every time some method of merging meta-wiki changes 
into the regular recentchanges is suggested (either by showing multiple 
wikis' RC in one list, as I suggested in April, or by integrating it in 
the main wiki(s) meta as a namespace) somebody says that the point of a 
separate meta wiki was to keep meta stuff *out* of the regular RC.

> I'm with Giskart on this one.  

You act as though I'm not. :)

-- brion vibber (brion @ pobox.com)