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accumulating more and more outdated information (probably in Wikipedia: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 ;-))