Wiki control

I have noticed some discussion (I can't remember where) on the philosophy of a Wiki; this concerned credited or anonymous articles.

For a Wiki to work it is essential that it is strictly limited to factual information presented in a encyclopedic style. This means, amongst other things:

Anonymous articles: Because articles can and should be edited by a number of people, attributing authorship is neither practical nor useful. As a consequence, articles must be impersonal articles with no use of personal pronouns.

No emotive text: Articles cannot be emotive. For example, in "Switching" there are phrases such as "self proclaimed experts," and "certain so-called experts". Such may occur in a message board thread, but they have no place at all in a Wiki.

 

Sam, sorry this will be long.

There are a number of points raised by your question.

First, I do not believe members would consider me to be the right person to exercise dictatorial control. Either someone else or a committee is needed. But if you think I am the right person then I will consider doing it (but see below). That will, of course, require administrative powers over the wiki base; the administrator(s) have to be able to do tasks such as change categories, change structures, change article titles, move articles, and even delete articles.

Second, I do not know anything about the software driving the wiki. I do not know what documentation came with it. I do not know what support is provided (I am aware of 2 faults in the software that need to be corrected). Most importantly, as far as I am aware there is no documentation on the category structure and how multi-level categories can be created, or even if they can. (And I do not know if the vault wiki menu can be changed to include different items.) Basically I have no idea of the potential or otherwise of the wiki.

Third, as far as I know no-one has worked out a statement of purpose for the wiki. You noted "This is not WikiPedia, but VaultWiki for the NAWCC MB." But that does not answer the important questions such as: Who is it for, members or the general public or both? If the public are included then how do the access it? I would assume we would rather the public be directed to the wiki rather than the day-by-day chatter on the MB. What material is acceptable and what is not? Should stub articles (with only a couple of lines of information) be allowed, or should the authors be made to produce something worth reading before it is accepted into the wiki? Should there be a number of moderators to supervise different categories? And so on. At present there are no guidelines, no-body is checking articles etc (go to special pages and see that almost all articles and pictures have not be placed into categories) ....

Most important is: what is the relationship between the MB wiki and wikipedia? And what should it be? These are absolutely vital questions. At the moment the MB wiki is so new and has so little information in that wikipedia is without doubt the preferred place to go for horological information. So when the MB wiki developed what will it contain to make it a viable alternative? What should we do about the wikipedia articles which have dubious content? Change it or simply put the corrected information in the MB wiki?

I think there is a real danger that the MB wiki will simply become a repository for the personal writings of MB members and it will not serve a useful purpose. If it does no more that mirror the existing MB thread structure then I very much doubt that it will achieve anything useful and it will never, ever compete with wikipedia.

Without some serious attempt to establish policies for purpose, content and structure it is quite possible that, after the first flush of excitement, people will cease contributing. I myself am hesitant to put much effort into it because I suspect contributing to wikipedia may be much more effective, especially from the point of view of public education.

 

Sam, at the moment I am still an outsider, an ordinary user. I know you and Tom are doing a lot of work - are you a committee? Some of the work needed is setting some basic principles/guidelines so everyone, including moderators and admin, have a clear basis to work on.