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@Calacanis.com | Mobile: 310-456-4900 http://www.calacanis.com | http://www.mahalo.com Executive Assistant: admin@calacanis.com
-----Original Message----- From: Phil Sandifer Snowspinner@gmail.com
Date: Sat, 13 Oct 2007 15:58:31 To:English Wikipedia wikien-l@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 _______________________________________________ WikiEN-l mailing list WikiEN-l@lists.wikimedia.org To unsubscribe from this mailing list, visit: http://lists.wikimedia.org/mailman/listinfo/wikien-l