On 11/16/05, Robert Scott Horning <robert_horning(a)netzero.net> wrote:
Ray Saintonge wrote:
The answer to deletionist controversies should
not always be to
establish a new project; it should lie in an attempt to find common
ground. That's something which a certain cadre of people on Wikipedia
refuses to seriously consider. I don't know what rules the Wikijunior
people have been violating in Wikibooks, but that is an omnous claim.
It seems to reflect the usual dynamic conflict between those who want
clarity and certainty, and those who treasure innovation as a primary
value. A project has a serious problem when either of those two gains
dominance.
The issue I have with Wikijunior is not that it is necessarily violating
Wikibooks policies, but that it exists in its own seperate domain in
many ways with its own set of policies, governed by groups of people
that otherwise have nothing to do with Wikibooks, or at least are not
actively participating in the larger Wikibooks community. Policy
decisions being made on Meta are being applied to Wikibooks, which IMHO
is especially difficult to deal with, especially when users and even
admins on Wikibooks are not even aware that these decisions are even
being made. I'm not talking general policies that apply to all
projects, but decisions about just the Wikijunior pages on Wikibooks.
This is especially difficult when long-term policy discussions are
taking place that a new contributor to Wikijunior has almost no way to
learn about unless they are already very well versed with Wikimedia
politics. There already is a small but growing community that is
working on just Wikijunior pages and very little else on any other
Wikimedia project. I don't know of any other comparable situation like
this for any other Wikimedia project.
--
Robert Scott Horning
There are Wikiprojects within Wikipedia, complete with their own style
guides and rules for the pages within the the project. Now those
rules don't override the general Wikipedia rules, in fact they're only
really suggestions - Wikipedia, like Wikibooks, is a wiki. The only
people on Wikipedia who have any real authority over top of being able
to argue their case and get people to follow them is the arb com. On
Wikibooks there isn't even that, afaik. As for the guidelines being
decided on meta rather than Wikibooks, I don't see why that really
matters, but at the same time it probably wouldn't be hard to convince
people to move the discussions.
From my understanding Wikibooks doesn't have all
that big of an active
community in the first place, sans Wikijunior. If that's
true maybe
that's part of the problem.
Anthony