On Thursday 26 September 2002 12:01 pm, Brion wrote:
My experience with Meta has been that I check it
somewhere between very
rarely and never, which makes it useless for me for discussion or site
announcements. On the other hand, the wikis I participate in *editing* I
check rather regularly (en, eo quite frequently, fr at least few times a
week; I check de for the bug reports page), and so I'm much more likely
to notice big news / help requests / policy discussions there. Likewise
the mailing lists (eg intlwiki-l) come directly to my inbox once I've
subscribed, so it's tough to ignore them.
Sorry Brion, but your logic here fails me (chicken and the egg scenario). The
Meta is practically useless for what it was made for because nobody uses it
for much of anything but a dumping ground of POV material. So by ignoring it,
you are extending its uselessness.
I really like the idea of having the meta be the neutral ground for all the
different Wikipedia projects and I am glad to see that several alternate
homepages in different languages have already popped-up. This trend should be
encouraged. Why not have the same setup for the Embassy pages? Isn't this
/exactly/ what the meta was made for?
If the software made it possible for people to see changes made to Metapedia
in their own language's Recent Changes then I can forsee much more activity
over at the Meta.
The original purpose of Meta was to balkanize discussion about the project
from the Wikipedia Recent Changes page. It was clear to me that would
inevitably lead (with the alternative of the mailing list) to the decay and
disuse of meta-discussion in the WikiWiki Way. And it has.
This can be repaired by unbalkanizing it and by unbalkanizing the mailing
list. Users should be able to include both meta and the mailing list updates
into the Recent Changes functionality.