On Fri, 27 Sep 2002, The Cunctator wrote:
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.
But that's not how I and the vast majority of people who supported the
creation of Meta-Wikipedia would put it. The fact of the matter is that
discussion of policy matters was beginning to dominate the Recent Changes
log and the article creation process, and nearly everyone (Cunctator at
least excepted) thought it was a problem. The word "balkanize" might
make it sound as if those of us in favor of creating Meta-Wikipedia wanted
to eliminate discussion of policy altogether. Well, speaking for myself
anyway, that certainly wasn't the reason. Keeping policy discussions
separate from article creation was a good thing, and I at least think it
still is.
But I do like the idea of having separate "Recent Changes" pages for
articles, for other established namespaces, *and* for a meta: namespace
and mailing list: namespace.
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.
It isn't clear to me that that has been altogether a bad thing. The
WikiWiki Way is a grand Way, but it is not the only Way. For purposes
of conversational back-and-forth, and arriving at consensus, the mailing
list format is arguably better. Web pages can be used to summarize
conclusions. Obviously I'm not saying this is the only way or that one
way is clearly better--just that our experience seems to indicate that
using the mailing list is better.
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.
Yes, a separate Recent Changes page listing recent mailing list postings
would be a very nice feature!
Notice, I've been saying "separate" Recent Changes pages, because I think
it would be nice if these different discussion continued, by default, to
be *kept* separate, so that we can concentrate on creating encyclopedia
articles unmolested by totally different concerns.
What would be even nicer is if we had a Recent Changes page that could
combine different Recent Changes lists at the user's preference. For
example, it would be nice if I could view the recent changes from
Philosophy, Psychology, Classics, and Religion, as well as the Wikipedia
namespace, the (to be created) Meta namespace, and the (to be created)
Mailing_List namespace, all on one page. Then, if it became too much to
deal with, one could unselect a few of the namespaces on the preferences
page and blissful silence would descend.
Larry