When was the last time a newbie was told to 'read the manual'?! ;) Mark
--- Michael Snow wikipedia@earthlink.net wrote:
Zoney wrote:
See my comments on that debate. Are people content
for the Wikipedia
namespace to have items other than the essentials
needed for running
en:? I mean, even with just that, there's a LOT of
operational clutter
(I think someone pointed this out on the village
pump recently -
suggesting a cleanup).
I would suggest we try to tidy up the Wikipedia
namespace, and move
jokes and satire to people's user space. I'm even
suggesting this for
BJAODN. It would also mean that a user would have
to take
responsibility for each page.
Surely the Wikipedia namespace is just there to
help out with the
running of the project?
Am I completely out of touch with everyone else on
this?
I definitely agree with Zoney on this, although I don't particularly think use of the Wikipedia namespace for joke material is the real concern. This particular frivolity should have been relatively harmless by itself.
However, we do have a longstanding serious problem in that there are fundamentally *way too many* pages in the Wikipedia namespace. Even discounting the pages dedicated to things like WikiProjects, or BJAODN, we have so many Wikipedia: pages that it is excessively difficult for people to find information when they need it. This is especially a problem for newcomers, and poses a significant barrier for anyone wishing to learn how to be an effective contributor. You can't exactly tell someone to "read the manual" when the manual's pages have been strewn all across the playfield.
If I thought it was realistic to enforce such a thing, I would suggest a moratorium on creating any new pages in the Wikipedia namespace. As it is, I think we should seek out opportunities to severely condense our statements of policy, redirect relic pages to more helpful locations, and generally weed out material of limited usefulness. This would make Wikipedia much more "user-friendly", something we fail abysmally at right now.
--Michael Snow _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@Wikipedia.org http://mail.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l
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