[WikiEN-l] A new and ugly trend

[John Lee]

On 6/30/07, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene at vanderpijll.nl> wrote:
>
> The Cunctator schreef:
> > On 6/29/07, Eugene van der Pijll <eugene at 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