[Textbook-l] MediaWiki (was: quality.wikimedia.org and wikiquality-l launched)

Dear community, On Thu, Sep 20, 2007 at 04:17:27PM -0400, Monahon, Peter B. wrote: Just what it says: Don't confuse MediaWiki.org with Wikipedia.org. The difference isn't obvious to everyone. These are different projects and simply the fact that they use the same software to present information on the WWW doesn't imply anything but shared technological limitations. But that's all it says. It's not saying you shouldn't contribute /any/ articles or use /no/ policies at all. Simply that you should keep in mind that for different projects, different approaches are needed. I disagree. From <http://www.mediawiki.org/wiki/About_this_site>: "MediaWiki.org has only one topic: the homonymous wiki engine MediaWiki." There is nothing about this that demands either encyclopedic scope or open, democratic participation. Nor any reason why that would be the best way to build the site. I disagree again. I had a (too short a) stint contributing to MW.org while I was working on a community project which used the MW software. During that time I found the developers -- who were the majority of the regulars -- to be open to new ideas and dedicated to the task at hand. It could be a bit of the latter (parenthesized). I found them to be mostly trying to get the technical aspects of the documentation settled, before attacking the huge task of moving and refactoring the relevant manual pages from Meta. They were, however, dedicated to doing it well and there were several discussions on the best way to present and organize the manuals. I think they have a good idea going. That idea is to have a consistent manual rather than a sporadic set of slowly growing stubs that take a whole lot of work and overview to tie together afterwards. There is also the problem of the Meta handbook which contains a huge amount of contributed material of sometimes very good material. The plan is to import the good parts into the MW.org manual. Merging it with a myriad of pages on various topics would prove to be hell for anyone to undertake. I tried them all and, though I didn't get a "red response", not once was I taken to a specific page with information on the search-word. Each time, however, I got a list of pages that might interest me. Which I think is great. Now, depending on who you are (user, admin or dev) you will be looking for different things regarding each of these topics. There is no reason why one should make any assumptions about the motives for the search. As for editing the wiki. If you're interested in improving the resources on MW.org, please begin by reading up on the structure that has been decided on. Granted, you may have some great ideas to contribute regarding the presentation of information on MediaWiki. In that case, I would hope you'd take them to the community and try your best to convince them. Keep in mind, however, that the presentation that has been agreed upon was decided after lengthy discussion, and that there is always the possibility that the crowd is right. Some -- including many proponents of democracy -- would argue that that is in fact the most likely. Thanks for your time, Martin Swift -- \u270C