Marc Riddell wrote:
on 10/20/08 2:30 PM, Oskar Sigvardsson at
oskarsigvardsson(a)gmail.com wrote:
Small tip if this really annoys you: use the
Modern skin. I personally
think it looks better than monobook, and it makes the links much less
stand-outy (as Joss Whedon would have said). I barely notice
overlinking.
Thanks for the tip, Oskar. The major point I have been trying to make for
some time is: for now and especially the future, if you want really serious
people, and really serious contributors, to take this Project really
seriously, a great deal of work needs to be done on its consistency and
stability. Right now it seems that the only "consensus" is that that there
is none. And the amazing thing is that most people seem to find that OK! It
needs to put down the pom-pons, stop with the "aren't we the greatest
because we have a zillion Articles" and get serious about cleaning up its
organizational act. In the larger scheme, the Project is still in its
infancy. Even adolescence is still a far way off.
I guess it depends on the issue. I don't see consistency of things like
linking patterns, date formats, and reference styles to be among the top
problems with a consensus-built summary of knowledge, nor the biggest
issues likely to rankle serious contributors. Much more problematic are
things like what counts as verifiability, what counts as undue weight,
how to deal with issues where consensus differs (sometimes sharply)
between different subgroups, e.g. different academic fields, or
different nations' historical views; how to avoid excellent articles
bit-rotting into pablum; and so on.
The other sort of inconsistency, academics at least are used to dealing
with all the time---the literature Wikipedia uses as references is
itself a big hodge-podge of inconsistency, which is why we have to
arbitrarily choose between e.g. competing naming schemes in the first place.
-Mark