Talk:Main Page

Should this wiki show 'meta.wikipedia.com' or 'metapedia', rater than just 'wikipedia' on the front page and elsewhere? Dave McKee

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Yes!  :-) --LMS

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The troll message on the front page might be perceived by newcomers inappropriately. Personally I think it serves only to discourage meta participation without some useful way of identifying trolls beyond "Larry says ...." or "The Wikipedia-L current cabal designates and Larry says ...." or whatever other mechanism is in force.

Having now been designated by some as a troll for expressing myself perhaps I am overly sensitive to this issues. Perhaps people who are too timid to express themselves despite constant harassment and oversight contravening the written policies on the front page as well as Jimbo's written philosophy of hands off minimum central authority try to learn how to get along .... my characterization or caricature of his writings ... read them yourselves to form your own ..... do not truly belong here. Perhaps they are no great loss and know nothing of any worth to any other current or future internet or otherwise Wikipedia reader or user. In this case be nice if they stuck around and used Wikipedia to learn something .... assuming of course that the local "community" wishes to remain part of the larger community of the human species or various civilization subsets of it locally or otherwise.

I will now waste some of my writing/editing time to go check the wikipedia-L archives to see if I have been laser or othwise designated by the cabal (nonexistent ..... a joke ... really!) as a troll or if this is a "Larry says ..." issue. First I think I shall edit the meta boldly. user:mirwin

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OK, the original text is now carefully framed to be neutral. If you don't agree that Sanger's departure has created some governance questions that we should keep front and center for now, you can always move that part off to a file called "governance" or something. But it seems at least as central as the software concerns to me. We should at least solicit an opinion from the people who show up at meta, in a way that makes it quickly useful to the rest of us, e.g. value system

If you see that the meta has been "neutralized" to the point where all mention of governance has been removed, by all means, restore it, this is going to be everyone's responsibility... sooner or later some consensus will arise. There aren't a lot of us using the meta anyway.

Oh, and apologies, 207, I should have framed it better the first time around. I didn't intend to try to set priorities for meta "as a whole", more like reflect the stuff that has repeatedly come up in talk pages. All the links solicit other people's opinions about wiki, I am not trying to impose that, and the only reason governance matters now more than other topics is Sanger's departure. That's it that's all.

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request to solicit input to governance on main meta page

All right, here I am, proposing a change to the meta main page. The same change as above: to put Larry's quote re: anarchy and a solicitation for contributors and users to comment on governance and the wiki value system. I don't care how this is phrased, I don't care who is perceived as running it, but I will note that the visions, worst cases and best cases files have got a trickle of participation, and threats might soon too. So there is some willingness to share these perceptions of the project, and some procedure (e.g. only, mine in status quo) could knit them together to understand the collective will here.

Without that, I don't see how to avoid falling back into anarchy, or empowering a clique of people who happen to have IP ban and page lock power, and who may or may not be able to take the project from 31,000 questionable articles to 100,000 balanced, neutral articles that satisfy someone who is not an English-as-a-first-language citizen of the U.S.A.. - if that's not the goal, pardon me, I thought it was, but I think we all should know what each other think it is. That's what best cases is for. If we just asked everyone to contribute to that on the meta main page, or to complain in worst cases, we might be able to get around personal debates and into the values we have to assess in order to take this project forward.

Thanks, 24.

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I approve of mirwin's proposed change to the meta page, and propose he add a link to w:social capital so people know what that means. I'd like to know if the concepts of Governing Operational distinction and Governing Ontological distinction would help to explain the w:instructional capital trellis on which this w:social capital garden grows...? 24

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mwirwin wrote the following on the main page:

Proposed insertion:

CONFLICT RESOLUTION ZONE

Our Goal To convert perceived trolls or arch editing enemies into valued colllaborating members of the Wikipedian community while providing the opportunity to modify the community's aggregate values a bit via productive public interaction in a moderated well defined forum. Newcomers and trolls are warned that much w:social capital exists here (true or false ??? seems thin to me at times) and that much effort is required to shift our community even small increments. Be pleased with small achievements ... our local implicit w:social contract and fabric was not arrived at with trivial investments of time and effort.

An arena established for allout debate, edit fests, to arrive at a useful product that newcomers and established community members can agree deserve to be in the main wikipedia. More importantly: much will be learned in this high energy area, participants are asked to remember that when finished we will be a closer community and have to get along for a long time until the next fork. Please be polite even when attempting to be colorful and energetic. user:mirwin

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Mirwin, if you read everything in 24's contributions you will notice that almost all of it is related to your conflict resolution process, and framed in simple terms that anyone can understand, unlike the various theoretical discussions of NPOV which come from G.O.D. (the Governing Operational Distinctor) Himself. If you could solicit others to contribute to the process of governance outlined there, we might eventually have an anti-clique party here. We might even manage to convert Larry Sanger out of his perceived trollishness. 2