On Mon, Feb 9, 2009 at 10:40 PM, Charles Matthews charles.r.matthews@ntlworld.com wrote:
George Herbert wrote:
What you're describing doesn't seem to me to be all that prevalent on en.wp now. I am open to examples and discussion to demonstrate a pattern requiring action. mailto:george.herbert@gmail.com
Well, I don't want to get into names. I recommend looking at subpage usage (easy for a given user now, link at the bottom of contributions) to get an idea of how userspace is applied. My past concerns range from "record keeping", i.e. making a point of logging things on the site as they happen so that anyone checking your recent contributions will see you've noticed), to "evidence gathering" when there is no dispute resolution in sight, to "essay writing" that is not really designed to produce an essay or position paper, but to allow commentary on the behaviour of others. These share the properties of being insidious (quite close to apparently legitimate usage) but also deleterious to the community.
Clicking on "random" for user pages is also quite, um, instructive. Just remember to make a note of the user pages you see that really set red flags off, or set you laughing, YMMV. Once you click away using Special:Random, and you shut the browser and lose the history, you may never remember where that page was!
As Charles says, though, most of the borderline stuff is in user subpages. Not sure if those show up in random clicks. I suspect they don't, as otherwise special:random would bring up archives all the time.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random/user
On the other hand, my first click led me to a subpage. <shrug>
But then again, it took me only five or so clicks to find this:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Debeo_Morium/Chats
Please don't run off and do something based on reading this. That would be a bit unfair. But is that a good example of the sort of thing Charles was talking about or not? Is that "community" or "blogging" or "chatting" or "encyclopedia building"?
To pick another example. The reference desks (which I think are great) are technically a bit divorced from the encyclopedia building, but I think are a legitimate side operation, especially when article do (sometimes) get improved as a result. It's also legitimate because some people prefer to ask humans a question and have them look it up, rather than look things up themselves. The side effect is quite a lot of chatter around the questions and answers.
Carcharoth