[Foundation-l] Show community consensus for Wikilove

[Keegan Peterzell]

On Sat, Oct 29, 2011 at 10:51 PM, Brandon Harris <bharris at wikimedia.org>wrote:

>
> On 10/29/11 8:36 PM, Jorgenev wrote:
> >
> > So far my only experience with extension:wikilove is having a new user
> > prefer it to just editing my talk page, and so over the course of a
> > mundane conversation about sourcing I earned myself two civility
> > barnstars and three trophies. Hooray!
>
>         One take away from this experience of yours could be that the
> process
> of utilizing talk pages is extremely arcane and horrible from a user
> experience perspective, while using WikiLove to communicate - even
> though it is the "wrong" channel - is far easier and preferable to new
> users.
>
>
>
Sure.  Is easier more educational?  There's the rub.

I'm all for making editing a more inviting experience, but progress has a
way of feigning ease and making things more simple for building an
encyclopedia removes the intellectual from the exercise.  Wikipedia is one
of the last places on the internet where it's not acceptable to write in all
caps, ignore rules of grammar, write in text message speak, or in general
not know how to write a paragraph.  We should whole-heartily embrace mundane
conversations about sourcing over shiny stickers, because what we learned
and retained from school wasn't from the gold star reward system..  I don't
approve or disapprove of the Wikilove extension- I simply don't use it in my
setup because it's my preference.  I do, however, worry to an extent about
quality over quantity.  I'd rather have someone write one nice talk page
note a year than drop barnstars for niceties.  But that's just me.

-- 
~Keegan

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:Keegan