On 6/30/07, John Lee johnleemk@gmail.com wrote:
On 6/30/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote:
The Cunctator schreef:
On 6/29/07, Eugene van der Pijll eugene@vanderpijll.nl wrote: and that a word with a spelling error is marked
"spelled wrong".
Fix spelling errors. THIS IS A WIKI. Are you seriously advocating that
a
spelling error should be marked with a footnote *instead* of being
fixed?
I'm sorry, no, I think I was a bit too sarcastic.
One reason these tags may be necessary is because talk page don't work as good for these issues as a few years ago.
It used to be that if you saw a problem with an article that you couldn't immediately solve yourself, you'd leave a message on the talk page: "Look at that sentence, it doesn't sound right, does anyone have an idea how to improve it?"
It used to be that only a small fraction of our articles had talk pages. If I came across an article with a blue link to the talk page, I always took a look; sometimes there was an interesting didcussion, sometimes just a cleanup notice.
Nowadays, 90% of our articles have a talk page, and 80% of them are empty.[*]
Because the reader is not an idiot.
Eugene
[*] I've got the talk page header boxes and the wikiproject pages turned of in CSS as well. I wish that that would make red links of talk pages containing boxes only...
Absolutely. Btw, for what it's worth, I don't think Eugene is endorsing the current state of affairs - he's just describing it. And I am really annoyed by these talk templates - they are pointless cruft that few people ever read. (Who on earth is going to be civil just because a template told them to?) The only helpful templates are those which would apply only if there has already been discussion (e.g. don't use the talk page for discussing off-Wikipedia things), Creating a separate namespace for them might be a good idea - meta data about which page is under the purview of which projects and its history of deletions, etc. is helpful, but just shouldn't belong on the talk page. (Not to mention having a standardised format for this meta data would make it easier to automate the process of gathering meta data about articles.)
Johnleemk _______________________________________________
I like Kingboyk's suggestion on http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Wikipedia_talk:Avoid_using_WikiProject_talk_pag... (last section). Make the discussion tab a different colour if there are only pointless (definately POV here) templates on the discussion page.
Garion96