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(a)telus.net> wrote:
Kelly Martin wrote:
On 6/4/06, Jimmy Wales <jwales(a)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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