Hi Anthere,
I very much appreciate these 'personal essays'. They should be given a proper place (don't remove!). They should however be separated from 'development'.
Software-development and maintainance is a very serious business, please don't call it 'hacking' any longer because Wikipedia is reaching adulthood. :-) (Grown-up software-developers don't call themselves 'hackers': It's all about thinking and mathematics!)
Please keep the 'personal essays', but not mixed with serious development stuff.
Thanks, Pieter Suurmond
Anthere wrote:
--- Erik Moeller erik_moeller@gmx.de wrote:
I agree with Anthere and strongly disagree with
eliminating personal essays
from meta. If POV material isn't allowed on meta
then where should it go? Um .. how about just getting rid of it? Why is it within Wikipedia's mission to somehow provide storage space for personal essays? We're an encyclopedia, not a hosting provider.
Taku is correct in that this only makes Meta hard to use, especially for other people who want to help working on the Wikipedia software. While it is possible to better organize meta, the Recent Changes list is cluttered by this stuff. There are literally hundreds of entries like this:
... # diff) (hist) . . MN Meta-symbiosis; 15:25 . . Saprtacus # (diff) (hist) . . M User talk:Saprtacus; 15:43 . . Saprtacus # (diff) (hist) . . M User talk:Saprtacus; 15:39 . . Saprtacus # (diff) (hist) . . M User:Saprtacus; 15:38 . . Saprtacus # (diff) (hist) . . MN Meta-etiology; 15:33 . . Saprtacus # (diff) (hist) . . M User talk:Saprtacus; 15:31 . . Saprtacus ...
Now try to find the critical "How Wikipedia can be really, really fast" development proposal hidden deep within this idiosyncratic nonsense.
Meta is not only about software development, so don't try to restrict his use for that matter.
Besides, you'll have to define what a "personal" essay is. So not only would we need a consensus for removal of pages from the meta, but we'll need a consensus about what a personal essay is, and we'll need to decide whether each and other page a personal essay is.
All that to make a couple of articles more visible (some on software development) or rather some less visible (those you think are trashing meta).
A simpler way could be to implement a little something which would allow a user to hide changes made by another given user.
This was asked on the french wiki btw (not by me). I think it would for example make sense to hide all the automatic generation of bots (after it is checked these are correct). That option sounds to me feasible, and more desirable than just arbitrarily removing other people stuff and upsetting them.
(oh crumbs, another feature to reject...)
Do you Yahoo!? Yahoo! Mail Plus - Powerful. Affordable. Sign up now. http://mailplus.yahoo.com _______________________________________________ Wikitech-l mailing list Wikitech-l@wikipedia.org http://www.wikipedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikitech-l