[WikiEN-l] Game-playing on Wikipedia

Tue Jul 5 23:52:56 UTC 2005

On 7/5/05, Daniel Mayer <maveric149 at yahoo.com> wrote:
> It is not harmless if it misdirects a sizable part of the community away from
> our primary goals.

Ah, but that assumes they'd be using that time to write articles in
the first place, which is a somewhat questionable assumption. In the
scale of things, I think "Wikigaming" (which seems to be the apogee of
tedium to me, but I'm not one to judge) to be less of a drain on
Wikipedia's brainpower than many other outlets. Which do you think
does more damage to Wikipedia on the whole: WikiChess or VFD disputes?
Of course, the latter can't be cut out, but I think the order of
magnitude of distraction, hurt feelings, creation of trolls and
vandals, etc. makes the WikiChess thing look fairly innocuous by
comparison. Seems to me that there are seveal quasi-arguments for its
favor and only a few quasi-arguments to its detriment -- might as well
keep it around until some of those quasi-arguments either way become
things which can be empirically supported in some way. Who knows what
it might lead to eventually? No need to nip it in the bud until it is
proven problematic.

That being said, it shouldn't be in the article namespace, but I
assume that's been taken care of already.

FF