User talk:MILSTD
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Hi Milstd,
You're very active on the wiki since some time. It's really good if you add things, but whould you please first look if the page is good (Show preview) before saving it? I saw you edit pages often 3-4 times within 30 minutes. Would you please try to collect some info, place it all in an article, show the preview and than save it in once.
That's easier for all of us.
Thanks for your understanding,
Gijs 09:21, 6 March 2008 (EST)
Hi, I'd really love to make more comprehensive edits at once, however due to the current state of affairs regarding the wiki, this can be hardly encouraged unfortunately.
Yes, sometimes I do indeed make commits without previewing things but that's mostly because of the latency involved doing ANYTHING on the wiki. And yes, I also find unnecessarily verbose commit histories somewhat disturbing.
However as discussed on the Main page's talk page, very often people will get kicked out or experience lots of other problems and even errors while working on the wiki. Thus making tiny atomic changes and saving them right away seems to be the easiest way to ensure that stuff is actually stored directly. Also, one of the most frustrating things is making significant modifications only to see that your session timed out and contents were not saved.
Apart from that, that's by the way how most wikis usually happen to work; not everybody has the time to sit down and make directly huge modifications of acceptable quality, rather people will often commit minor changes, so that contents will grow increasingly until they justify being refactored accordingly to resemble one comprehensive article, hopefully with an overall improve in quality. All this doesn't necessarily have to happen by one single person, though.
Anyway, you've really done a magnificent job at cleaning up the wiki, it has become so much more intuitive and convenient!
However, some of your modifications regarding my commits could be considered somewhat short-sighted, while I do understand the problem and share the view about empty skeleton pages and stub categories, it is important to view this issue from a wider angle: checking out my commit history (but also the commit history of several other contributors), you might notice that quite often page skeletons are committed to provide a structure and foundation for future contributions using boilerplate contents, sometimes this works right away-sometimes it doesn't.
In fact, some of the page skeletons (i.e. pretty much empty pages) I have created in the past have meanwhile become rather popular and are among those pages that are being consulted relatively often.So, such pages aren't necessarily about immediate usefulness, but must rather be seen as foundations for later additions and to provide a form of structure that is essential to cleanly organize contents.
This approach has in the past indeed worked quite succesfully for various different pages and contributors.
Yes, empty pages can be frustrating from a user's point of view, however on the other hand this is also how such pages get more attention, so that more potential contributors are made aware of a page being requested comparatively often.
So, rather than removing all references to such boilerplate pages or possibly even removing the pages altogether, it might make sense to find a compromise, which might for example entail moving them to less prominent places and putting such items into their own "Currently being worked on" section, but also putting a "stub" attribute on all such pages.
Regarding the removal of various categories that I recently added to several pages, you seem to have a misconception about why I added them in the first place, you may want to check out my user page to find an explanation for the motives behind adding such categories; in short: unless someone is going to step up and replace those sections of the wiki that are currently being abused to implement functionalities that are normally provided by separate dedicated software suites (i.e. bug tracker, FAQ database, aircraft database, knowledgebase system), such wiki contents are not as accessible as they ought to be, it is for example hardly possible to easily search existing bugs, or categorize aircraft by meta information.
The compromise that I settled for was to add corresponding attributes (i.e. categories) to each page in order to eventually be able to at least refine searches using such categories, so that for example an aircraft's properties were formally described using categories to determine feature completion. --MILSTD 10:25, 6 March 2008 (EST)
You say that a Wiki is for tiny additions at a time. That's true, not everyone has got the time to make a large article at once. But you certainly do because you're working 30 minutes on one article, but you do it in 5 pieces or less. I've got problems with the Wiki to. It's not always working correct at the moment. But you could save the article (just copy the code with Ctrl+C) before showing a preview. If you're kicked out than you could simply refresh and paste (Ctrl+V) the code back in the editwindow.
Empty pages aren't needed. If you just place a wikilink at some pages to an article that doesn't excist (yet) it's good. Everyone could see that the article is empty (it's a red colored link) and it appears in the Special:Wantedpages list. People who want to add articles could search this list and they'll see the article you've placed the links for. This way it's easier for all of us to see if an article excists or not. If you make a page with only some headings it looks like the article excists while it isn't.
I agree with you that some more categories are needed. But it's not needed to make a categorie with only one or two articles in it (unless you're sure there will be soon more articles fitting in that categorie). I'm not saying that all your categories are usseless. There are some good ones (and I've made a categorie that was not needed later on to) and I don't wanna encourage you to stop helping us at the Wiki. But I really appreciate it if you would write a little more content on articles rather than just creating them and categorising them.
Thanks and succes with your further wiki-work ;)
Gijs 10:48, 6 March 2008 (EST)