SJ:
It seems likely that once s/he tires of on-wiki games
(which is
admittedly difficiult, considering what an adrenaline rush our new
gaming platform is), with a positive view of the local community, this
will be a natural outlet for other notes and work...
Mh-hm. Notes and work, eh?
Here's the opposite scenario. We're all fun-loving people and we allow
this guy to set up his "Wikigames" project as an unofficial part of
Wikipedia. He starts about 20 new game pages, all as subpages of
Wikipedia:Wikigames, which we accept as legitimate. He invites some of
his friends to join. A #wikigames IRC channel is set up. A parallel
community grows in that section of Wikipedia of people who primarily
play games.
While every single human being on the planet should read Wikipedia, I'm
not convinced that every single human being on the planet should edit
it. There are people who are mentally ill, utterly ignorant,
fundamentally irrational, belligerent, rude, paranoid, malicious, and
worse. We can edit their pages, but we have limited access to their
brains. There are people who, in spite of our best efforts, will never
become useful contributors to the site. I like to believe that their
number is small. The cynic in me says otherwise.
The fact that Wikipedia is an encyclopedia acts as a social filter. If
you encourage and allow the growth of a parallel community, that social
filter loses much of its effectiveness. Moreover, even the process of
post-discovery discouragement may no longer work, because these users
have their Wikigames ghetto to return to and come back from, where rules
like NPOV are as relevant as Schopenhauer is to the Furry fandom.
I therefore strongly oppose the growth of parallel communities.
Wikigames need to be very limited, and linked to the encyclopedic nature
of Wikipedia itself.
Erik