Dark Side Of The Wiki

There is no DarkSideOfTheWiki. As a matter of fact, it's all dark. (Not so dark, just part of the WikiExperience.)

Dark as in Unknown

Various people have various experiences of wiki. In general, if you enjoy your experience here, that's a wonderful thing. But there is a DarkSideOfTheWiki. People who become so annoyed with one another, or with themselves, that they give up trying to MakeSignalNotNoise and start ripping and tearing at each other and newcomers too. Happily the dark side is not stronger.

That all may well be true, but what about shifting the focus from the negative and let's just call it the "Mysterious Side Of The Wiki"? This way we get the sunny side and we get some mystery to poke around in too!

I think the real problem is the InvisibleSideOfTheWiki? (there are too many actions that can't be annotated):

Create a page.
Watch as page is deleted without justification or debate.
Re-create page and watch it be deleted again, without justification.
End result: You waste time in a DeleteWar? and never even knew why the person thought it was inappropriate.

There is that, and it just is not right, but then that is Wiki for you. One good thing it does do, is it gives you a chance to update and rewrite your page when you restore it.

True - It might be nice if just "delete" alone didn't work though - instead requiring a justification/explanation. Some people really don't know why things are deleted, or why someone took exception.

You have a very good point there. I wonder if something could be worked out as a solution for that. Perhaps having something to do with how that currently there is a delta length that one must not exceed when adding comments when deleting, perhaps adding a minimum and extending the maximum?

I'm thinking that when the "delete" token is recognized, it checks to see if (message_length - strlen("delete") > 10) or something similar.

Your discussion is interesting. This is from HowToDeletePages : "You can delete pages in wiki by replacing all of the existing content with the word "delete". A page needs to be less than fifty characters long for this to work. (This page won't delete even though this paragraph says delete over and over.)" So as was said, I wonder if this could be done in reverse so that when you delete you need at least X characters, so as to force some kind of explanation. And, I wonder what would happen if page deletion had a forced wait period of like three days or so?

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