[WikiEN-l] Game-playing on Wikipedia

[Erik Moeller]

SJ:
> I'm not sure that intense game-playing on the wiki is a great thing. 
> And we can all imagine marginal ways in which doing anything but
> concretely building the encyclopedia -- editing one's own user page,
> adding to BJAODN,  fooling around with personal CSS or javascript
> settings, chatting with friends about non-encyclopedic subjects --  is
> 'wasteful'.

None of these activities are perfomed exclusively by members of the 
community. (In the case of BJAODN, it's also a useful service, because 
the people posting stuff to BJAODN are frequently the same who are 
vetting out the nonsense in the first place. BJAODN also reduces 
trolling about censorship.) If they are, as in the case of people 
abusing their user pages as webspace, we generally don't tolerate it.

The issue is that games can exist entirely in parallel to 
encyclopedia-building. For example, the user who created the 
"Wikipedia:Wikigames" project (since redirected) has never made a single 
edit to a Wikipedia article. When the fun activity becomes the primary 
focus and the encyclopedia becomes incidental, a line has to be drawn.

That's why I believe, as I have posted earlier, that any fun or game 
activity has to meet a rather high threshold of community approval. If 
games have to be started in the Wikipedia: namespace, instead of the 
Sandbox as currently happens frequently, I think things will evolve 
naturally into that direction.

Surely banning all "fun" from Wikipedia would be an overreaction. But 
this is not going to happen. As is often the case on wikis, things tend 
to escalate beyond a certain level of tolerance, the group who was 
previously a minority suddenly becomes a majority, and the measures 
advocated become more drastic. Hopefully this will lead to a mutually 
acceptable solution in the end.

Erik