>> Supposing the wiki editors >> don't >> start shouting at each other or at the BLP subject, but actually listen to >> each >> other's lines of reasoning? That could take days!
> And sometimes it does, and this is something you must be prepared for. Heh, that was meant as sarcasm. The Angela Beesley article on Wikipedia was deleted, what, a year and a half after she brought it up? > Sometimes you just have to make hard decisions. This is where the need for > personal leadership comes in - if you can be convincing enough and champion > a valid a way out of eternal flame-wars, you may avoid contributor burnout. > (I had a productive little meeting with five > other admins at Anthrocon 2006 in which we eventually dropped the > "user-editable page policy", among other changes) One thing I have learned from this situation is that the Doom Wiki is at an awkward intermediate stage of growth: too large for the founders to be trusted with off-wiki shortcuts like the one above, but too small to risk a drama storm by handling legitimate complaints pedantically. In addition, we've been around long enough that the people at the major community portals are aware of us, but they still view the wiki's content as "maintained by someone else" rather than open to their contributions. A statement by one or more wiki admins that a unilateral decision had been made without obvious consensus, "for the greater good", would strengthen that belief irreversibly. (In fairness, their assumptions are undoubtedly supported by their experiences of every other gaming web site ever.) Thus, although I personally thought a courtesy deletion policy the best compromise between remaining "encyclopedic" and not leaving anyone permanently pissed off, the on-wiki discussion did not concur with my opinion, and I was about to close the thread accordingly. Fortunately, one of the admins of longer community standing did it first (I really had been pretty involved in the heated arguments, so I thought it would look like a power grab; maybe that's not what GreenReaper meant by "strong leadership"). The upshot is that, while we couldn't agree on any general policy, we managed to decide that putting the controversial paragraph in the bio article was giving it undue weight, and that it really belongs in the article with the other six or seven controversies (!) related to the same software. Maybe when _60 Minutes_ finally does a story on people whose job prospects and credit rating are damaged by Google results, we'll have to revisit the issue... Are we a more mature project now that we've had our Allison Stokke case? Like other forms of maturation, by the time you find out whether or not it was a good idea, it's too late to change your mind (I know I'm done sticking my nose into the bio articles). Again, thank you all for responding here; I didn't use all your suggestions, but each one made me feel that I wasn't alone. -- "Ryan W" _______________________________________________ Wikia-l mailing list [email protected] http://lists.wikia.com/mailman/listinfo/wikia-l
