[WikiEN-l] Cleaning the Wikipedia namespace (was [[Extreme article deletion]] is up for deletion)

[Michael Snow]

Zoney wrote:

>See my comments on that debate. Are people content for the Wikipedia
>namespace to have items other than the essentials needed for running
>en:? I mean, even with just that, there's a LOT of operational clutter
>(I think someone pointed this out on the village pump recently -
>suggesting a cleanup).
>
>I would suggest we try to tidy up the Wikipedia namespace, and move
>jokes and satire to people's user space. I'm even suggesting this for
>BJAODN. It would also mean that a user would have to take
>responsibility for each page.
>
>Surely the Wikipedia namespace is just there to help out with the
>running of the project?
>
>Am I completely out of touch with everyone else on this?
>  
>
I definitely agree with Zoney on this, although I don't particularly 
think use of the Wikipedia namespace for joke material is the real 
concern. This particular frivolity should have been relatively harmless 
by itself.

However, we do have a longstanding serious problem in that there are 
fundamentally *way too many* pages in the Wikipedia namespace. Even 
discounting the pages dedicated to things like WikiProjects, or BJAODN, 
we have so many Wikipedia: pages that it is excessively difficult for 
people to find information when they need it. This is especially a 
problem for newcomers, and poses a significant barrier for anyone 
wishing to learn how to be an effective contributor. You can't exactly 
tell someone to "read the manual" when the manual's pages have been 
strewn all across the playfield.

If I thought it was realistic to enforce such a thing, I would suggest a 
moratorium on creating any new pages in the Wikipedia namespace. As it 
is, I think we should seek out opportunities to severely condense our 
statements of policy, redirect relic pages to more helpful locations, 
and generally weed out material of limited usefulness. This would make 
Wikipedia much more "user-friendly", something we fail abysmally at 
right now.

--Michael Snow