[WikiEN-l] Comparison with other wikis (was Here's an interesting one)

[David Gerard]

[cc: to uncyclopedia-l - this was originally on wikien-l in a tedious
discussion of tedious deletion process]


Alphax wrote:

>Oh screw it. Let's make a new committee which will handle *all* deletion
>and undeletion requests, except speedies and copyvios. Let's call it,
>um, Uncyclopedia...

Heh. Since you bring it up, I'll give the list the comparable
experience of Uncyclopedia.

As far as we can work out (I stated these rules, other users seem to
like them a lot and Chronarion, the local God-King, endorses them),
the rules of Uncyclopedia are:

1. Be funny and not just stupid.
2. Don't be a dick.

- in that order. (i.e. you can be a bit of a dick in the interests of
Teh Funny, but if you want to make a hobby of it you'd better be the
funniest bastard on the wiki and prove it frequently.) The odd point
is that "Don't be a dick" is rule 2 rather than rule 1, but the nature
of humour frequently involves cruelty. c.f. [[Uncyclopedia:Useless
Gobshite of the Month]] and [[Uncyclopedia:VFP/Kakuns Place]].

You can see considerable discussion of these on the Village Dump -
http://uncyclopedia.org/wiki/DUMP . I wrote an expanded ruleset (which
you can see there) which Uncyclopedia:User:Famine has written a
slightly different version of. Which is good too, because beyond those
two rules everything else is commentary.

Uncyclopedia is a much smaller wiki than Wikipedia, and my greatest
fear is that it will become as process-bound. That would be a *really
bad thing*. We also have only 48 admins and they're added sorta slowly
by Chronarion-fiat.

The way deletion works on Uncyclopedia these days tends to be:

- if it's completely worthless, an admin can kill it on sight, a
regular user can add it to QVFD (Quick VFD) where it will likely be
killed.
- if it's *probably* completely worthless, anyone can put {{NRV}} (No
Redeeming Value) on it, where it has one week to be improved or it'll
get huffed (deleted) by a bot run by Carlb.
- only put it on VFD (which is as long-winded and tedious as
Wikipedia's) if it's really quite borderline, though improving the
article if possible would be a better idea.

NRV is the greatest idea ever seen on Uncyclopedia and it's doing its
job to make the wiki content better in a process-light manner. Our
article count isn't actually going through the roof and if you hit
'random page', you're less likely to hit obviously worthless crap.

I'm not sure any of this is applicable to Wikipedia, but we're trying
to learn from its mistakes ;-)


- d.