Hello.
Snipped many parts out, only replying to the last 2 paragraphs.
I hate committees, and I think it's a bad idea. However, I want to open discussion on how to address this problem, because I definitely think if it hasn't already, it deserves to be elevated to "problem" status.
I don't have anything against articles in many different flavors & formats. Ok, when i write articles i try to write'em in a certain way, so they have coherence. But apart that, people should do what they want.
I'm not sure we want to standardize everything. Because it means people have to learn that format, to know where to find it in the first place. You have to enforce it. It makes for wars as new users come in, or people don't like the format, and say "hey this format should be changed like that", and people reply "per decision of 2 weeks earlier no, we keep that", and so on and so on.
- Fancruft and how to cope
Sure. When the wiki is slow, we should just cut off en:. After all, that's a fancruft, and it shouldn't exist. Or we should just concatenate all pages in one big page, there wouldn't need to have any page existence checking.
More seriously: saying that merging articles could (help) solve slowness is a bad social solution to a technical problem. People want to write articles, as many as they want. What would be next? "Sorry, you made more than 5 modifications in the last 15 minutes, please wait 15 minutes to that everyone get a chance to edit"?
Site is slow? Make software faster, buy new hardware, optimize, imagine a bewolf cluster of servers on the moon, whatever - do *not* try to restrict the freedom people have.
Sorry if my tone sounds rash. I'm totally against your idea, maybe because I do write "fancruft" articles but also because it's imo totally against the founding ideas of Wikipedia - this doesn't mean i despise you :)
Nicolas Ryo
Accédez au courrier électronique de La Poste : www.laposte.net ; 3615 LAPOSTENET (0,34/mn) ; tél : 08 92 68 13 50 (0,34/mn)