[Foundation-l] Re : Where we are headed

[Robert Scott Horning]

Birgitte SB wrote:

>--- James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>  
>
>>To respond to Jimmy's e-mail,
>>
>>Another problem with communication is all the pages
>>it spans. I maintained
>>several user and user talk pages, but I only need
>>two of them. Although the
>>normal MediaWiki software can maintain the status
>>quo, Wikimedia's should be
>>designed a bit differently: the projects can have
>>the mainspace, the portal
>>space, and the project space, but a central wiki
>>(Meta, anyone?) would have
>>the help pages and the user/user talk pages. Surely
>>this has been discussed
>>before?
>>    
>>
>
>
>Centralizing the help pages is  a bad idea.  There are
>technical differences between projects.  For example
>en.WS has subpages enabled and therefore uses relative
>linking which does not work on other projects.  There
>once was a bot that went through and imported on the
>Meta Help pages into en.WS (even overwrting some of
>local copies!)  It was not useful and they were all
>run through deletion.  They too detailed, too much
>information. Local help pages need be very simple and
>deal with just the common issues, and then link to
>Meta for advanced help.
>
>Birgitte SB
>
>  
>
Ditto for Wikibooks.  We just had a VfD for the help pages, and the 
whole help system was revamped to eliminate the duplcated pages from 
Meta, and asked that the bot not be used any more to import the pages 
(which was even overwriting comments on the talk pages to kill the bot 
as well).  We still link to the Meta help pages for in-depth 
information, however.

-- 
Robert Scott Horning