On 08-08-2002, Daniel Mayer wrote thusly :
On Thursday 08 August 2002 08:20 pm, tarquin wrote:
The reasoning was fairly simple: Wikiprojects are organized in a hierarchy. Naming conventions are increasingly hierarchic too. When I create a page, I seek information about how to name it and how to present it. It's stupid having to career halfway across the Wikipedia to find those two pieces of information.
[snip]
"conventions". As a matter of fact, I do not want us to have /any/ content convention other than NPOV -- anything more will tend to stifle innovation (consistency is nice, and I do strive for that, but it should /not/ be in any way confused with policy).
[snip]
I sympathise with Tarquin. There seems to be a need for 1. conventions - sparing us the tedious task of renaming lots of articles' names, giving Wikipedia consistency that is needed more for casual readers but for regulars 2. IMO there is need for some meta information. The idea has been already mentioned and generally refuted as "a bad thing". However, now we have 36k articles, and with 100k+ ? Wouldn't we drown in a kind of information soup ? The process of classification is going on constantly. There are numerous lists and lists of lists. I am not advocating imposing some strict rules but to gradually improve and implement meta-info in some sort of unobtrusive way like the software upgrade has been. Once we had Manning with us. I suppose he is a meta information professional.
As a side note, Wikipedia is growing (not a grown-up yet) and there is accumulating more and more outdated information (probably in Wikipedia: namespace mostly) examples are Wikipedia NEWS, Most popular pages etc I think there is a need for putting some information on Wikipedia and META Wikipedia into a "historical" perspective.
Best wishes, kpj.
P.S I dropped in on Wikipedia chat yesterday but it was stagnant. That was because Wikipedians' main passtime is writing and copy editing articles. Silly me ;-))