About liquid threads. It all depends on which Wikimedia project
you're editing and publishing. If you have been using liquid threads
since August 2010, using them now is like a walk in the park.
Aversion to change is, however, a serious question and there's always
a price to pay when it is mishandled or not handled at all.
Only now did I realized that Strategy consubstantiates most of what I
thought was a distant hypothesis. I wonder no more. It's right there
before my own eyes and for everybody to see. Strategy is such a great
project that I don't even know if it has any administrators,
bureaucrats and so on. Never noticed any of them. Never felt the need
to look them up for any reason whatsoever. If what was sated is
correct, that Strategy is a "completely new wiki where all banned
users could come and troll," I'm very sorry to be the bearer of these
disappointing news: editing and discussing in Strategy is a breeze.
Please bear in mind that I do not have a 100 per cent knowledge of
everything that has been written in Strategy. I'm given testimony
based on my own experience and observation. I can even provide some
quantitative data about that experience, whose analysis is beyond the
scope of this post.
A very dear friend of mine, who is a sysop, ex-bureaucrat and
checkuser of the pt.wiki, who has been careful enough to publicize in
12 of 19 edits that I was either banned or blocked in the pt.wiki,
while never mentioning a single accomplishment of mine on pt.wiki or
any other Wikimedia project, follows me everywhere I go like a good
pet. As soon as I started to participate in the ongoing Strategy
discussion, at 2:19, on March 13, 2011, a little over 24 hours later,
at 4:10, March 14, he started editing on the same project, allegedly
"to help on vandalism combat," presumably from this vandal (add that
to scourge and troll). Why does your pet dog follow you everywhere
you go? Because they love you and want your company. Anyway, he has
been completely out of luck.
Moving to Meta as an alternative to Strategy, would be a giant step
back for Wikimedia. Meta is the worst of the worst Wikimedia projects
I know. Of course, Meta Queens and Kings (no pun intended, please
read Rullers) are free to run any "new ideas" page they see fit, but
I wouldn't put any of my money on it. As a matter of fact I would
like to see them do it, so that we could all have the benefit of the results.
Before I finish, as the runner up to Meta's undisputed leadership,
let me mention the Brazilian Wikipedia, where to this day both me and
my students are still the object of vandalism and abuse. It is so bad
that nobody dares to do anything about it, despite my continued
pleas, and I have the evidence to back every word that I'm writing
here. The Bronze goes to the English Wiktionary.
On the other end of the rainbow (again, no pun intended) is a pot of
gold called Portuguese Wikibooks. It has been a privilege for me and
my students to work there. On every virtue, every human quality that
you may think of, the guys that run that project are absolutely
outstanding. I should know. I am the same person, and they handle all
the grief I cause them as true civilized human beings. It' has been
an honor to be in such company.
Sincerely,
Virgilio A. P. Machado (Vapmachado)
At 07:34 10-04-2011, you wrote:
I'm not convinced that the need to retype your
password was the only
or even the main reason why Strategy had relatively few participants
from the community.
Using Strategy as a testbed for liquid threads was also a contributory
factor, I'm sure I wasn't the only person who had problems with that.
I think it would have been better to ask for one of the smaller wikis
to volunteer - perhaps with a promise of extra developer resource in
compensation. But using Strategy as a pilot for Liquid threads meant
that for most editors the Strategy wiki was less familiar than it
needed to be, and when there were glitches with Liquid threads it was
all too easy to stop editing on Strategy and go back to your home
wiki, that's certainly what I did.
I suspect that launching a completely new wiki where all banned users
could come and troll was slightly too brave and open a move for some
editors, and that it would have been better to have run Strategy as a
project within meta. In fact if we are serious about the
simplification agenda then migrating the contents of Strategy to meta
would be a logical step to take, perhaps also with a rename to "new
ideas" as that was what it effectively became.
WereSpielChequers