[WikiEN-l] Re: Poll on templates

Fri Jul 15 15:26:59 UTC 2005

--- Michael Turley <michael.turley at gmail.com> wrote:
> Personally, I couldn't care any less about reusers.  The existence of
> reusers is simply a byproduct of the license of the project.  I don't
> think we should go out of our way to either accomodate or
> inconvenience them in any way.  They get exactly zero weight my
> decisions.

Reuse is at the heart of what free content is all about and having everything
as free content is a very large part of our goal and mission. Having too many
Wikipedia/editor-specific references makes reuse harder than it needs to be and
thus goes against our goals. 

> I only care about the readers and editors.  What is useful to the
> readers is the same thing that is useful to the editors. 

Not so. A WikiProject tag has very little use to readers. The only exception
would be in the references section where an external link styled link to a
WikiProject page may be appropriate. I have done this for some WikiProject
Elements articles where I state where the data came from for the tables. The
WikiProject ref is for readers who may want to know what references where used
for different parts of the table. 

And, as I have already said, this does not apply to sub-standard articles.
Those need extra help and asking readers for help is valid. Thus a WikiProject
link as part of a subject area stub message is OK. In the future it would be
nice to be able to add meta tags to all stub, clean-up and POV messages that
could be used to exclude any article with those tags from being included in a
special download dump for reusers and anybody interested in making a print
version. 

The point is to limit messages aimed at editors to talk pages except in cases
of clearly sub-standard articles. When the tagged article gets fixed, then the
message goes away. 

> That is
> blunt and obvious honesty about the amorphous nature of any Wikipedia
> article.  I've already seen reports that cite articles in Wikipedia as
> if they're complete and static.  This is absolutely wrong, and occurs
> because we're not obvious enough about the nature of the Wiki.

'Edit the page' is already at the top of every page and awareness of how we
work is spreading very rapidly. The fact that many articles do stay so stable
for so long is a testament to how fast vandalism and other rubbish is
cleaned-up. This is a good thing. 

> Finally, templates and tags can easily be stripped from the articles
> for anyone who wants it that way, by reusers, or by the team that puts
> together a "static content" version of any form.

This would be true if such messages where few in number and every reuser used
MediaWiki software. 

-- mav

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