On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, The Cunctator wrote:
If the software made it possible for people to see changes made to Metapedia in their own language's Recent Changes then I can forsee much more activity over at the Meta.
The original purpose of Meta was to balkanize discussion about the project
^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
from the Wikipedia Recent Changes page.
But that's not how I and the vast majority of people who supported the creation of Meta-Wikipedia would put it. The fact of the matter is that discussion of policy matters was beginning to dominate the Recent Changes log and the article creation process, and nearly everyone (Cunctator at least excepted) thought it was a problem. The word "balkanize" might make it sound as if those of us in favor of creating Meta-Wikipedia wanted to eliminate discussion of policy altogether. Well, speaking for myself anyway, that certainly wasn't the reason. Keeping policy discussions separate from article creation was a good thing, and I at least think it still is.
But I do like the idea of having separate "Recent Changes" pages for articles, for other established namespaces, *and* for a meta: namespace and mailing list: namespace.
It was clear to me that would inevitably lead (with the alternative of the mailing list) to the decay and disuse of meta-discussion in the WikiWiki Way. And it has.
It isn't clear to me that that has been altogether a bad thing. The WikiWiki Way is a grand Way, but it is not the only Way. For purposes of conversational back-and-forth, and arriving at consensus, the mailing list format is arguably better. Web pages can be used to summarize conclusions. Obviously I'm not saying this is the only way or that one way is clearly better--just that our experience seems to indicate that using the mailing list is better.
This can be repaired by unbalkanizing it and by unbalkanizing the mailing list. Users should be able to include both meta and the mailing list updates into the Recent Changes functionality.
Yes, a separate Recent Changes page listing recent mailing list postings would be a very nice feature!
Notice, I've been saying "separate" Recent Changes pages, because I think it would be nice if these different discussion continued, by default, to be *kept* separate, so that we can concentrate on creating encyclopedia articles unmolested by totally different concerns.
What would be even nicer is if we had a Recent Changes page that could combine different Recent Changes lists at the user's preference. For example, it would be nice if I could view the recent changes from Philosophy, Psychology, Classics, and Religion, as well as the Wikipedia namespace, the (to be created) Meta namespace, and the (to be created) Mailing_List namespace, all on one page. Then, if it became too much to deal with, one could unselect a few of the namespaces on the preferences page and blissful silence would descend.
Larry