[WikiEN-l] Jason Calancis on Wikipedia's technologicalobscurantism

Sat Oct 13 20:13:36 UTC 2007

Re: message boards we built a new system for them on mahalo.com (search for discussion link on the sopranos page to see it). We've contributed it back, or are close to doing so (need to ask my devs). So, if wikipedia wants message boards like this I can loan out a developer for a week to help impliment it.

Best, j
---------------
Jason at Calacanis.com | Mobile: 310-456-4900
http://www.calacanis.com | http://www.mahalo.com
Executive Assistant: admin at calacanis.com

-----Original Message-----
From: Phil Sandifer <Snowspinner at gmail.com>

Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2007 15:58:31 
To:English Wikipedia <wikien-l at lists.wikimedia.org>
Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Jason Calancis on Wikipedia's technological
	obscurantism

On Oct 13, 2007, at 9:40 AM, David Gerard wrote:

> http://www.calacanis.com/2007/02/20/technological-obscurification-
> three-ways-wikipedia-keeps-99-of/
>
> (no, he didn't know the word "obscurantism.")
>
> Discussion please.
>

His point about talk pages is particularly good - I doubt a lot of
the templatecruft we put on talk pages is worthwhile given the
oppressively long amount of non-text that it brings up when one tries
to edit.

At the very least, we should move things like WikiProjects, GA
nomination statuses, and other such pieces of processcruft to a
subpage and transclude it so that newbies trying to discuss on talk
pages just get "{{single template link}}". We could probably afford
to do the same with infoboxes and the like on main articles - move
them to a subpage and transclude a single template. Yes, it makes
editing the infobox a step less intuitive, but someone who can't
figure that step out probably can't handle the template syntax anyway.

-Phil
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