WikiIndex talk:Community talk: Difference between revisions

WikiIndex talk:Community talk (edit)

Revision as of 12:50, 9 May 2009

4,233 bytes added , 9 May 2009

Comments added to 'Site reviews'

David Shepheard

211

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 --[[User:MarvelZuvembie|MarvelZuvembie]] 17:09, 8 May 2009 (EDT)
+:One problem with this strategy, is that one of the places I've seen that has a 'review' of a wiki is [[Wikia]]. Wikia is a wikifarm, so the issues that have been brought up on that page relate to any future wiki that someone might choose to host on Wikia (or elsewhere), but they also relate (to a lesser extent) to every wiki that has the Wikia category added to it.
+:I think you get two types of information from a 'review':
+:* 'opinions' which are personal points of view and might not be shared by other editors and
+:* 'facts' which can be verified by citations that link directly over to some sort of feature.
+:I've got my doubts about the usefulness of 'opinions'. Everyone has their own opinions about things. If someone was to say that a specific wiki is 'too slow' then how am I supposed to decide how slow that is? But I think that facts (i.e. things that we can provide citations for) are much more likely to be useful to people. If something has a citation, I don't have to decide if user X has his facts straight. I can just surf over and have a look.
+:Wikipedia has a 'no original research' rule, and I wonder if a 'no original opinions' rule could be the best way to deal with 'reviewing a wiki'. Instead of having someone sit down and 'judge' the quality of the wiki, they could simply list a set of bullet points for the wiki's 'Pros and Cons' and link to external pages that give further information.
+:Some of the pros and cons of wiki farms apply to all of the wikis hosted on that wiki farm. You could (for example) make a template for Wikia (Template:Wikia perhaps) that lets people know that the wiki has various Wikia features (shared help, a single sign in for all Wikia wikis, community assistance at the central wiki, visiting admins who help fight spam, etc, etc). Descriptions of these features could actually be put on the Wikia category page, or alternatively, you could create a Wikia namespace (and have a page called 'Wikia:Shared help' that gives full details about how the help system works - or in this case does not work as it is currently broken). I'm not sure how this sort of thing should be set up, but it is something that could be cut down to an absolute minimum and then added to all Wikia wikis. (If it was done right, it could also add the Wikia category to the wiki in question.)
+:In fact I wonder if anything that is statistical could be something that should be put into some sort of template. If lots of wikis have advertising, then should [[Template:Wiki]] be updated to have a line that lets people know if a given wiki has adverts on it? Or would it be better to have additional templates (like you already do with [[Template:Size]]?
+:I also wonder if Template:Wiki should have sub-templates, that deal with specific types of wikis that have special requirements. For example, a number of wikis have been set up to deal with fictional worlds. From the point of view of fictional worlds 'canon' is a very important thing. Some people may be looking for an encyclopedia of canon and would not 'value' a wiki that contains stuff that is not from the canon of the original source. On the other hand, other people are interested in expanding that fictional world with fan-fiction and would not want to work on a wiki that did not allow them to add fanon material.
+:I think that specific bits of information, like the examples I've given, can be very helpful to someone who wants to decide if they should spend time reading or writing on an individual wiki, but if I just read that User X thinks that 'Wiki Y is brilliant or rubbish at doing Z', then that really isn't helpful to me. I think that things like the wikiFactor (which is an optional feature on Template:Size) are so much more useful than longhand opinions, because I can very rapidly compare two wikis and decide which one I prefer. Feautures like wikiFactor, put the reader in the driving seat and inform rather than preach. More importantly, things like wikiFactor (or the absence or lack of adverts) are things that can easily be translated from English into a ton of other languages - long winded opinions are going to cause translation delays. [[User:David Shepheard|David Shepheard]] 08:50, 9 May 2009 (EDT)