[WikiEN-l] Game-playing on Wikipedia

Sat Jul 2 22:53:56 UTC 2005

On 7/2/05, daniwo59 at aol.com <daniwo59 at aol.com> wrote:
> Nevertheless, we have recently seen quite a bit of game-playing on
> Wikipedia. If it is not stopped now, it will continue to grow. 
<  As for referring to the people who oppose these games and
> tournaments as "killjoys," this is a very upsetting ad hominem attack. 

"You keep using that word. I do not think it means, what you think it means."

    http://en.wiktionary.org/wiki/Killjoy

By the way, if you are vehemetly against these games, or people
playing N degrees of separation, do you really want to be associated
with the Department of Fun?

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WP:FUN#Members

> Jimbo has offered a place on Wikicities for people to play. He has even

I'm not sure that intense game-playing on the wiki is a great thing. 
And we can all imagine marginal ways in which doing anything but
concretely building the encyclopedia -- editing one's own user page,
adding to BJAODN, fooling around with personal CSS or javascript
settings, chatting with friends about non-encyclopedic subjects --  is
'wasteful'.

But the interesting question is, to what extent being able to relax
and take a break on-wiki *is* beneficial to the project.  Perhaps we
can discuss that; does leaving content-free "Welcome back!" messages
for others indicate one is not interested in the project's goals?

-- 
++SJ