[WikiEN-l] Re: Sub-stub city

Mon Aug 9 14:22:45 UTC 2004

see below:

On 9 Aug 2004, at 09:09, wikien-l-request at Wikipedia.org wrote:

> ------------------------------
>
> Message: 7
> Date: Mon, 9 Aug 2004 00:09:01 -0700 (PDT)
> From: Stephen Adair <SWAdair at computermail.net>
> Subject: Re: [WikiEN-l] Re: Sub-stub city
> To: English Wikipedia <wikien-l at Wikipedia.org>
> Message-ID: <20040809070901.92DFAE4B9 at sitemail.everyone.net>
> Content-Type: text/plain; charset="us-ascii"
>
> Thank you, Jens, for some very good advice.

No thank you! :-)
You're the one who's been doing a lot of hard work in the trenches.
:)

> Specialization is needed
> for a project this large, but maybe I've been specializing too much.
> Maybe what I need is to branch out more, spending less time on New 
> Pages
> and more time elsewhere.  Calling all volunteers -- 20 minutes a day,
> New Pages wants --> YOU.  :-)

I have just had a look at [[Wikipedia:New_pages_patrol]], thinking that 
maybe I could dig in for a bit.
Reading through that page, I'm astonished at the "sign up for the new 
page patrol in 15-minute chunks" rule.

Is that /really/ required?

It seems seems to be a bar to (patrol duty) empty to me -- it's almost 
as if it was "too official" -- any new patrol volunteer (including me) 
will want to have a look at one or two new pages at a time and see how 
s/he is getting on. Then /maybe/ progress from there. Again, is this 
"signing off" really required? It seems to me that a decent flagging 
system (as Timwi is implementing) will obsolete that, and I would think 
that to be a huge step forward.

Any thoughts on that, anyone?

> Frankly I'm amazed by all the thought given to this topic already, both
> pro and con.  I agree with Timwi that a minimum byte count will not
> rule out someone holding down a key to make a really long test page,
> but I do think fewer people would do that.  I think a significant
> percentage would stop testing when they realized "Oh, wow.  It was
> actually about to create an article.  The only reason it didn't was
> that what I wrote was too short."  Maybe that's just me being naive,
> placing too much trust in the good intentions of others.  Maybe not.
> I still think a (low) minimum byte count would reduce the overall
> maintenance load for new pages without driving away potential new
> contributors.
>
> Oh, and I *love* the new Recent Changes Patrol feature Timwi is
> developing.

Yep. Good job, Timwi ! :-)

> Anything that will reduce redundancy in maintenance is
> wonderful.  Personally, I would pass on checking anything that had
> been reviewed by two admins.  Sure, there is a wide range of opinions
> even among admins, but that would satisfy my criteria for trust.
>
> Thank you,
> Stephen W. Adair
>
> P.S.  I had never encountered a word-wrap problem before.  'Sorry about
> the last e-mail.  For this one I've been hitting "Enter" at the end of
> each line.  I hope that improves readability.

Yea, weird one, that.
(Luckily /my/ Mac OS X Mail hasn't got a problem with your emails -- 
it's happy to wrap them at the window border. ;-)
Just curious: What email program are you using?

Thanks and regards,
Jens Ropers

There are two types of IT techs: The ones who watch soap operas and the 
ones who watch progress bars.
http://www.ropersonline.com/elmo/#108681741955837683
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