[WikiEN-l] Cleaning the Wikipedia namespace (was [[Extreme article deletion]] is up for deletion)

Thu Nov 18 04:33:31 UTC 2004

When was the last time a newbie was told to 'read the
manual'?! ;) Mark

--- Michael Snow <wikipedia at earthlink.net> wrote:

> Zoney wrote:
> 
> >See my comments on that debate. Are people content
> for the Wikipedia
> >namespace to have items other than the essentials
> needed for running
> >en:? I mean, even with just that, there's a LOT of
> operational clutter
> >(I think someone pointed this out on the village
> pump recently -
> >suggesting a cleanup).
> >
> >I would suggest we try to tidy up the Wikipedia
> namespace, and move
> >jokes and satire to people's user space. I'm even
> suggesting this for
> >BJAODN. It would also mean that a user would have
> to take
> >responsibility for each page.
> >
> >Surely the Wikipedia namespace is just there to
> help out with the
> >running of the project?
> >
> >Am I completely out of touch with everyone else on
> this?
> >  
> >
> I definitely agree with Zoney on this, although I
> don't particularly 
> think use of the Wikipedia namespace for joke
> material is the real 
> concern. This particular frivolity should have been
> relatively harmless 
> by itself.
> 
> However, we do have a longstanding serious problem
> in that there are 
> fundamentally *way too many* pages in the Wikipedia
> namespace. Even 
> discounting the pages dedicated to things like
> WikiProjects, or BJAODN, 
> we have so many Wikipedia: pages that it is
> excessively difficult for 
> people to find information when they need it. This
> is especially a 
> problem for newcomers, and poses a significant
> barrier for anyone 
> wishing to learn how to be an effective contributor.
> You can't exactly 
> tell someone to "read the manual" when the manual's
> pages have been 
> strewn all across the playfield.
> 
> If I thought it was realistic to enforce such a
> thing, I would suggest a 
> moratorium on creating any new pages in the
> Wikipedia namespace. As it 
> is, I think we should seek out opportunities to
> severely condense our 
> statements of policy, redirect relic pages to more
> helpful locations, 
> and generally weed out material of limited
> usefulness. This would make 
> Wikipedia much more "user-friendly", something we
> fail abysmally at 
> right now.
> 
> --Michael Snow
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