--- James Hare <messedrocker(a)gmail.com> wrote:
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?
Centralizing the help pages is a bad idea. There are
technical differences between projects. For example
en.WS has subpages enabled and therefore uses relative
linking which does not work on other projects. There
once was a bot that went through and imported on the
Meta Help pages into en.WS (even overwrting some of
local copies!) It was not useful and they were all
run through deletion. They too detailed, too much
information. Local help pages need be very simple and
deal with just the common issues, and then link to
Meta for advanced help.
I completely agree with you and Robert on this. Wiktionary faced the
same problem from the same bot. The changes included warnings that it
was pointless to freely edit these because the edits would be
overwritten with the next update of the Meta pages. Even if the
information were all valid, a simple link to the corresponding Meta page
would have been enough.
Ec