בתאריך יום ג׳, 1 בינו׳ 2019, 07:37, מאת Paulo Santos Perneta <
paulosperneta(a)gmail.com>gt;:
Ahh, it would really be a fantastic improvement if we
could get rid of all
that template & category clutter from the articles.
[...]
Let me tell a little
story: Some months ago I was in a workshop with a
group of librarians, and
they were creating articles using VE. At some point all of them came under
a barrage of fire from resident wikipedians, bombing them with warnings
saying "you MUST add categories"
I spent my first year or so on Wikipedia, editing and creating quite a lot
without understanding how categories work. Those were the days... Other
people, to who I'm deeply thankful, quietly fixed them after me. I later
learned how to work with them myself. If my edits were deleted because I
did not add categories, I'd possibly be away from this project.
and pointing them to the oldfashioned
instructions on how to add them on wikicode, totally
useless for newbies
using VE.
This is another symptom: many of the help pages are hopelessly out of date.
And the main reason for this is that they are too localized: they were
initially created before we had better (but still not perfect) tools for
global pages and translation. Now the veterans think they're good even
though they rarely need them, and the newbies are just puzzled by them, and
for the developers of new features it's too hard to manage help pages that
are so dispersed across wikis and languages.
It was the first time I was using VE myself in a more intensive
way, and while all of we were hastily trying to find
where the heck
categories were hidden in VE,
So here are a couple of things that you can do, and please tell everyone
else to do them: use the VE more! It will very frequently save you time,
and it will help you understand newbies better.
If it's not good enough for you to use more, report bugs! The only ways to
find bugs are to use it more yourself and to carefully observe other people
using it (see
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia:Wikipedia_Signpost/2017-02-06/Op-…
and
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=l6sS0M9TpYQ&t=27m28s ; note that the
relevant part of the video begins at 27:28).
And every time a newbie asks you how to do something, check whether the
relevant help page in your wiki documents how to do it in VE, and if it
doesn't, take a few minutes to add the info.
None of these things will by themselves make a big strategic difference,
but it will make the work smoother for a lot of people, at least in the
short term.
the librarians kept asking, puzzled - what
are those categories that seem to be of such a crucial
importance to
wikipedians?
Well, categories should actually be fairly easy for librarians to
understand. If these librarians had a hard time with them, it doesn't mean
that they are stupid, but that our categories system is badly broken.
The sad fact is that 99% of those people that send those
useless warnings have not the least idea what
categories are for, they
simply notice they are missing in a newly created article, and as they know
they are not supposed to be missing because they have been warned
themselves, they mimic the behavior perpetually
Yes! Don't tolerate the perpetual mimicking of very old practices. Speak up
and change stuff.
Wikipedia should be a big club of people who like sharing knowledge, and
not a small club of people who managed to learn wiki syntax.