To respond to Jimmy's e-mail,
Another problem with communication is all the pages it spans. I maintained several user and user talk pages, but I only need two of them. Although the normal MediaWiki software can maintain the status quo, Wikimedia's should be designed a bit differently: the projects can have the mainspace, the portal space, and the project space, but a central wiki (Meta, anyone?) would have the help pages and the user/user talk pages. Surely this has been discussed before?
On 6/25/06, Ray Saintonge saintonge@telus.net wrote:
Kelly Martin wrote:
On 6/4/06, Jimmy Wales jwales@wikia.com wrote:
Could communications be improved? Yes, of course, but this is something we have all known for a long time. I believe that the core problem is not a lack of information flow, but excessive flow of raw information which makes it hard for anyone to keep up with it all.
Yes, this is exactly the problem. For someone like me, for whom Wikimedia is an avocation and not a vocation, there simply isn't enough time to read all of the huge morass of information that is out there -- spread out over a dozen mailing lists and a dozen wikis, not to mention other sources -- required to form a fully informed opinion. This definitely hampers my overall participation.
It's easy to agree on that problem, and at the same time it's only a very small segment of the community that is generating it all. Getting literally everybody's opinion would be totally unmanageable.
We each do best within a limited set of parameters, editing articles about the topics which most interest us. A person who sticks to that is probably happy and has little use for long policy debates or reviewing technical "improvements". If he does not participate in such discussions he is presumed to have consented. If he complains when the policy or template is imposed he is told that he had an opportunity to discuss the matter at an earlier time.
Whatever happened to writing in plain English? (or French, or German, or whatever language?) The number of policies and templates could easily be cut in half, and very few of us would be missing anything. It's easy to concede that fewer of these would diminish the "professional" appearance of the site, but how many of us are paid professionals? What's more important, the content or the window dressing?
Maybe the policies mean something. I don't know. I haven't got time to read them all, let alone absorb their meaning. If someone comes to the mailing list complaining about being blocked, I've gotten to the point where I delete the whole thread. His claim of admin abuse may be valid, but I don't give a damn.
At one time Mav imposed upon himself the rule that each of his mailing list contributions needed to be offset by a real contribution to a real article. That wasn't such a bad idea.
Ec
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