[Foundation-l] Re : Where we are headed

Mon Jun 26 03:38:27 UTC 2006

Birgitte SB wrote:

>--- James Hare <messedrocker at gmail.com> wrote:
>  
>
>>Another problem with communication is all the pages
>>it spans. I maintained
>>several user and user talk pages, but I only need
>>two of them. Although the
>>normal MediaWiki software can maintain the status
>>quo, Wikimedia's should be
>>designed a bit differently: the projects can have
>>the mainspace, the portal
>>space, and the project space, but a central wiki
>>(Meta, anyone?) would have
>>the help pages and the user/user talk pages. Surely
>>this has been discussed before?
>>    
>>
>Centralizing the help pages is  a bad idea.  There are
>technical differences between projects.  For example
>en.WS has subpages enabled and therefore uses relative
>linking which does not work on other projects.  There
>once was a bot that went through and imported on the
>Meta Help pages into en.WS (even overwrting some of
>local copies!)  It was not useful and they were all
>run through deletion.  They too detailed, too much
>information. Local help pages need be very simple and
>deal with just the common issues, and then link to
>Meta for advanced help.
>
I completely agree with you and Robert on this.  Wiktionary faced the 
same problem from the same bot.  The changes included warnings that it 
was pointless to freely edit these because the edits would be 
overwritten with the next update of the Meta pages.  Even if the 
information were all valid, a simple link to the corresponding Meta page 
would have been enough.

Ec