On 7/5/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
It is not harmless if it misdirects a sizable part of the community away from our primary goals.
Ah, but that assumes they'd be using that time to write articles in the first place, which is a somewhat questionable assumption. In the scale of things, I think "Wikigaming" (which seems to be the apogee of tedium to me, but I'm not one to judge) to be less of a drain on Wikipedia's brainpower than many other outlets. Which do you think does more damage to Wikipedia on the whole: WikiChess or VFD disputes? Of course, the latter can't be cut out, but I think the order of magnitude of distraction, hurt feelings, creation of trolls and vandals, etc. makes the WikiChess thing look fairly innocuous by comparison. Seems to me that there are seveal quasi-arguments for its favor and only a few quasi-arguments to its detriment -- might as well keep it around until some of those quasi-arguments either way become things which can be empirically supported in some way. Who knows what it might lead to eventually? No need to nip it in the bud until it is proven problematic.
That being said, it shouldn't be in the article namespace, but I assume that's been taken care of already.
FF