[Foundation-l] Has Wikipedia changed since 2005?

Wed Sep 22 09:23:57 UTC 2010

On Mon, Sep 20, 2010 at 8:02 PM, Peter Damian
<peter.damian at btinternet.com> wrote:

> Some excellent comments in the last few posts.

I agree, it's been an interesting conversation.

Now... do we have a call to action?

One of the things I note with this mailing list is that we are good at
pointing out problems and there's a lot of insight to be gained from
reading the threads. I'm a better and more committed Wikipedian for
being subscribed.

I wonder, though, whether we ought to push ourselves to try and come
to resolutions towards the end of threads like these and my favoured
way of doing that would be that we try to finish up with "I am going
to do x, y and z."

For the most part I think that the response will be "er, I don't
intend to do *anything*!"

And that's entirely reasonable. I imagine many of us have our own
goals in place for years to come*. The majority of people have
priorities that are different to those expressed in any one thread. It
would be strange if every thread that began suddenly caused everyone
to shift their focus.

So I guess the only reasonable way to institute this is for the person
who started the thread to always come back at the end (say when
nothing has been added for a week) with a post expressing a course of
action. Not only would this give us more of a sense that our
conversations are having a meaningful impact on the projects but, in
expressing a next step, the original poster might get one or two
others on board saying "I'll help with that."

And that conversation-closing post might just be "I've summarised this
discussion on [wiki page]" with a link.

The great thing about conversations on wikis is that they can be
discovered and revived in the future. That isn't going to happen on
this mailing list, where conversations are ephemeral. Conversations
may be *repeated* but that's not the same thing.

And an upside, if we place this sort of burden on anyone who starts a
thread, might be that starting a thread becomes more of a thought out
process; you start one knowing that you will experience some peer
pressure to meaningfully conclude it. It would hopefully mean fewer
threads and more concrete results.

* My preference is for proof-reading / copy editing and for every
article I read I identify a further article to be read, and it is not
uncommon for one article to show me tens more (via the templates at
the bottom) candidates for a read. So, for some time, my work load (or
play load, since I enjoy it) has been growing exponentially rather
than decreasing.