On 2/7/06, [LiM] Manop manop@6tub1.com wrote:
When I was a Wikipedian newbie, I wrote many guidelines on Thai WP including major policies and those manual of styles . Most of them I adopted from EN and modified for Thai users. I started writing those one by one. Although they're not complete at first but useful enough for new Wikipedians.
To me those are the things which make people talking in the same page. When there are "enough" users, that time the guidelines will be rewriten to match the community.
Well, obviously in some wikis this rewriting thing doesn't really happen - not as much as needed. Pages growing old and outdated, not really updated with the exception of robots throwing in interwiki links och an occasional user adding a sentence (s)he feels is missing... the "NPOV" page was first transferred to svwiki in November 2002, an early version of the page called "Policy" (now "Policy and guidelines") arrived in december same year, "What Wikipedia is not" was transferred in August 2003, the first version of the "Copyright"-page that consisted of more than one line arrived from enwiki + frwiki in October 2003, etc.
It looks to me like people worked with these things the first year or so. After a while people started reworking a bit and adding new pages. There became a tendency of writing "policies" as "rules" - "you should do this and that", "it should be done in this way" etc. The tone speaking down, from the people who knew how to do things to those do don't. After early 2004 or so, nothing much seems to have happened in most of these pages. Oldies used them to tell newbies how things should be. When talking about the not updated guideline and guideline-like pages with one of the oldies, I got the response "well, there should be a balance. People shouldn't be too encouraged to edit in these pages". Then there has been the tendency to look to enwiki for "rules" which is not always so easy, since not everybody is as good in English as they might think. Looking to enwiki for "rules" means that you always expect they will be written by someone else.
Are there any other wikis where some users feel that the Wikipedia namespace in general (not only guidelines) is underdeveloped, and hasn't kept the pace with the rest of the wiki?
How does one make users feel that they are welcome to, and should, edit and update the pages in the Wikipedia namespace and also create new ones when needed?
Howcome people at, for instance, enwiki bothers with these pages? The most common response I get from my local wikicommity is "it's boring, I'd rather write articles".
/Habj