[WikiEN-l] Wikipedia is not a dictionary (was: Re: Old Wikipedia backups discovered)

[Anthony]

On Fri, Dec 31, 2010 at 1:04 AM, quiddity <pandiculation at gmail.com> wrote:
> 1. Given that the majority of Wikipedians are not subscribed to this
> mailing list (or at least don't post to it), having decisive
> discussions here is not very practical.

I would think that fewer participants would make decisive discussions easier.

> The mailing lists are good for
> brainstorming, alerting, and sharing, (etc), amongst the small number
> of participants; they are not good for establishing a consensus on the
> "nature of Wikipedia".

Sorry, I couldn't resist plagiarizing Jimmy Wales and his widely
ignored principles from his user page.

> 2. Given that you infrequently participate on-wiki,* and your historic
> reticence to even communicate on-wiki,** I'm not surprised by this
> suggestion.

Yes, I find wiki talk pages to be a terrible form of communication.
There's no push notification, no decent threading, post-hoc
censorship, a requirement to release everything you write under
CC-BY-SA, etc.  And the silly memes regarding Wikipedia talk pages
don't even allow people to utilize the benefits of a wiki - non-signed
content, modification of content, multi-person collaboration on a
single paragraph.

Wikis make sense for collaboration, but not for communication.  ~~~
and ~~~~ never made any sense.

> However, I would suggest that the mountain is unlikely to
> come to you; instead, you must go to the mountain.

In this particular case, the mountain had already come to me.  I was
just objecting to your suggestion that it go back.