User blog comment:Zane T 69/Wiki Improvements/@comment-778071-20160626023744

Just my two cents on the issues raised.

There are some good ideas here, but in several areas it would be wise to exercise caution.

Forums - I set up Forum:The Impala, and from experience (on other Wikis), it's a solid infrastructure from hosting discussions. An easy-to-use interface for setting up new topics and archiving them when closed such that they can be retrieved easily at a later date. The reason it's inactive is because most users naturally found it easier to create a user blog post. Though I've pointed out that it's not appropriate to have a Wiki discussion on an individual user's blog, I've let it slide in most cases since the discussions had already gone into full swing by then.

Message Walls - Just my personal opinion, but having been around long before message walls existed, I'd have to say that the talkpage system is preferable. I'll admit the Post Comment and editing toolbar functions are nice for the average user, but for someone who has to go through an entire discussion to identify the community consensus, message walls are hell. You have an unintuitive system of the most recent messages being at the top (i.e. upwards), and replies to each individual message going downwards. This discussion thread is a case in point. It makes more sense to have the earliest messages at the top, and any other replies or new posts will be put at the bottom and carry on from there. This is how we read any piece of writing: top to bottom, right to left, and is far more intuitive. You want the latest inputs at the bottom because you can't understand the latest comment until you've read all the previous comments.

Sysops - To clarify, adminship is not a job. Strictly speaking, a job has working hours, requirements/obligations, workloads. Adminship is a voluntary position taken on by active members who have gained the community's trust, and are expected to exercise good judgement with regards to Wiki matters. But the act of editing is a voluntary act, and I think it would go against the ethos of the Wiki if we started requiring sysops to make x number of edits every y number of days, because this is not a job. If you were suggesting desysopping inactive users of security reasons, then you'd have a case, but I think what it really comes down to is: are you willing to trust a user with these sysop tools even if he is inactive for a year? For most of our active and recently inactive admins, I think the answer is yes.

Rollbacks - Rollbacks are granted quite readily if a user has exhibited interest in reverting vandalism and has been on the Wiki for a substantial period of time. I should point out that it's less about meeting a certain minimum number of rollbacks, it's more about having users request for those tools in the first place as the barriers for getting rollback tools are not high.

Vandalism - We've had this discussion before. Again, it goes against the ethos of a Wiki to prevent anonymous users from editing. Yes, it's where majority of vandalism comes from. But it's also where majority of the contributions come from. Wikipedia gets far more vandalism than all the Wikis combined, but why does it keep its doors open? For those who are interested in the history of Wikis, you may be interested: [http://www.aaronsw.com/weblog/whowriteswikipedia Who Writes Wikipedia? By Aaron Swartz]

"When you put it all together, the story become clear: an outsider makes one edit to add a chunk of information, then insiders make several edits tweaking and reformatting it. In addition, insiders rack up thousands of edits doing things like changing the name of a category across the entire site — the kind of thing only insiders deeply care about. As a result, insiders account for the vast majority of the edits. But it’s the outsiders who provide nearly all of the content."

"nearly all of the content" - this is what we stand to lose if we're short-sighted and focus on reducing vandalism without regard for content creation.

Policies, The Impala Forum, and other things are available at the top of the Special:Recentchanges, under MediaWiki:Recentchangestext. Like you said, adding it to headers might be a good way to give it more publicity.

Could you elaborate on why you think 3RR needs to be removed? I think it sends a clear signal that edit-warring is not acceptable and editors in conflict need to step away from the article and onto a talkpage, regardless of who is right. Edit-warring is always counterproductive (edit-warring, not reverting vandalism to be clear)

Looking forward to hearing your thoughts (and others), cheers.