Marc Riddell wrote:
on 10/20/08 2:30 PM, Oskar Sigvardsson at oskarsigvardsson@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