On 7/15/05, Daniel Mayer maveric149@yahoo.com wrote:
--- Michael Turley michael.turley@gmail.com wrote:
Personally, I couldn't care any less about reusers. The existence of reusers is simply a byproduct of the license of the project. I don't think we should go out of our way to either accomodate or inconvenience them in any way. They get exactly zero weight my decisions.
Reuse is at the heart of what free content is all about and having everything as free content is a very large part of our goal and mission. Having too many Wikipedia/editor-specific references makes reuse harder than it needs to be and thus goes against our goals.
If something makes it easier to generate content, but happens to make it harder to reuse content off site, I'm still all for it. Free content does not mean we should reduce the value on the main site to satisfy third parties. Reuse rights are simply "take it or leave it as it is". However, if there's something that increases the value of reuse without having any impact on content generation, then I'm all for that as well.
I only care about the readers and editors. What is useful to the readers is the same thing that is useful to the editors.
Not so. A WikiProject tag has very little use to readers. The only exception would be in the references section where an external link styled link to a WikiProject page may be appropriate. I have done this for some WikiProject Elements articles where I state where the data came from for the tables. The WikiProject ref is for readers who may want to know what references where used for different parts of the table.
WikiProject tag locations should be decided primarily by the WikiProject members. If they think it is useful enough to the reading public to put on the article page, then it almost certainly is. Assume good faith among the WikiProject members. Join their discussions and perhaps you can convince them that your way is correct. Please don't campaign for policy votes to empower people to dictate personal preferences to others.
And, as I have already said, this does not apply to sub-standard articles. Those need extra help and asking readers for help is valid. Thus a WikiProject link as part of a subject area stub message is OK. In the future it would be nice to be able to add meta tags to all stub, clean-up and POV messages that could be used to exclude any article with those tags from being included in a special download dump for reusers and anybody interested in making a print version.
The point is to limit messages aimed at editors to talk pages except in cases of clearly sub-standard articles. When the tagged article gets fixed, then the message goes away.
All articles are sub-standard in one way or another. There is no state of perfection that articles can reach. Even if there were, our process doesn't allow locking an article if it ever did reach that fictional stage. We acknowledge this, sometimes very openly; while other encyclopedias often pretend to present absolute truth instead. Of course the tag messages are transient in nature; but they go away when consensus forms that they aren't required anymore, not when an article is fixed. They reappear again when someone sees something that could be improved. There is no "final version" of a Wikipedia article.
That is blunt and obvious honesty about the amorphous nature of any Wikipedia article. I've already seen reports that cite articles in Wikipedia as if they're complete and static. This is absolutely wrong, and occurs because we're not obvious enough about the nature of the Wiki.
'Edit the page' is already at the top of every page and awareness of how we work is spreading very rapidly. The fact that many articles do stay so stable for so long is a testament to how fast vandalism and other rubbish is cleaned-up. This is a good thing.
This might be a good point, except that the articles referenced were not stable, nor can we count on them ever being stable. Also, we cannot count on readers' prior knowledge of how we work. We should be clear and explicit at all times. I also won't assume our readers will learn how we work when they come here because if all they're coming for is the content, their purpose for visiting is not to explore how we create the content.
Finally, templates and tags can easily be stripped from the articles for anyone who wants it that way, by reusers, or by the team that puts together a "static content" version of any form.
This would be true if such messages where few in number and every reuser used MediaWiki software.
-- mav
Templates are easily removable with a simple script. Part of the value of using templates and tags across many articles is that their uniformity makes them easy to find (and remove, if desired). How many there are is irrelevant. What software a reuser chooses is unrelated trivia.