Lets Withdraw Into Solipsism
Lets Withdraw Into SolipsismFrom CrazyThingsThatMightSaveWiki
How about, then, FilteredRecentChanges and/or FilteredQuickChanges?? (Or filters in general)? Wiki could store as part of a user's preferences info on which pages the user isn't interested in--the user than could specify WikiBadges he/she wishes to ignore. Don't like off topic posts? Put "OffTopic" in your filter-file. You could still view such pages if you follow links to them or type them into the goto window, but they wouldn't pollute your view of RecentChanges
Speaking of which, right now we have RecentChanges and RecentEdits. It would be nice to be able to exclude minor edits from quickChanges if one wants, or at least have some indication of a minor edit. (While on the topic, could it be arranged such that pages which have been double-deleted show up QuickChanges as well - making it easier to spot acts of vandalism)?
One reason for the deletion wars is that different people have different ideas of what is OffTopic. (This is not to say delete wars are the only or even major problem we face, but let's fix one problem at a time.) Instead of fighting EditWar to delete off-topic pages, why not just implement a killfile that will hide the off-topic stuff for you?
The purpose would be that topics in your killfile will be
I'm not saying this would work well for wiki, but has anything like a shared killfile ever been thought up. Like: kill everyone in my file, kill everyone my 'friends' kill, and kill everyone N of my friends' friends kill. I guess it's sort of a trust metric thing.
The only problem with killfiles is that they don't have a good track record. Usenet didn't get out of its death throes on the strength of kill files, despite the fact that everyone was using them.
The purpose of Wiki killfile is only to reduce delete wars, not the general EditWar or other problems. There is no equivalent of delete wars in Usenet, since only a few technically savvy can delete entire threads (the only thing that corresponds to a Wiki page), whereas everybody can delete in Wiki. So I doubt a comparison with Usenet is even valid.
[Your comments about Usenet killfiles are off the mark. Post/thread deletion on Usenet is not at all related. Killfiles are used by individuals to make posts that match certain criteria forever invisible to that individual; for instance, if they never want to see an ArchimedesPlutonium post ever again, they put him in their kill file. Or any posts with subject lines that contain the word "abortion", or "Tibet", or that are crossposted to a kibology newsgroup.]
[I see nothing preventing a comparison between that, and possible mechanisms for Wiki (although I'm not at all sure that it would be a good idea to use such a thing)]
Killfiles shouldn't be used because they're ugly, inelegant and ad hoc mechanisms existing on top of the wiki system and not integrated into it. It would be better if we were each able to define any number of recent changes pages which would "subscribe" to any number of categories of pages (by having a link from the recent changes to the category). Then, the page compiler backtracks through a page's categories to hit every recent changes it can reach. If it also backtracks through the poster's homepage, then it also allows a blog style subscription model where you keep track of specific authors you like.
Basically, killfiles are a broken, ugly as sin, after the fact way of having multiple localized recent changes.
The social implications are different also, since a killfile opts out of input, whereas localized recent changes opts into input. What that means is that if someone you dislike wrote something in a category you're keeping track of, you'd still see it. Whereas with a killfile, you wouldn't see changes to a category you like just because someone you dislike happened to make the change. You're seeing the union of what you like instead of excluding the union of what you dislike. You end up seeing more AND it's easier to reason about.
FilteredRecentChanges is a temporary solution at best. And by temporary, I mean a few days. Some of the annoyances come from genuine EditWars, but I think we can all agree that a good part of it is also plain WikiVandalism - small-minded bored people who come here to annoy us for their amusement. If we try to use FilteredRecentChanges to keep the trolls away, someone will quickly invent a better troll. Instead of focusing on a few pages, the vandalism will happen on completely random pages all over wiki. You can keep adding them to your killfile, but after the trolls adapt, they will not likely touch the same page twice. So the end result is that you have replaced the current situation of annoyance with a worse situation involving both annoyance and lots of laborous list-keeping. -- MichaelSparks
You seem to think that all "annoying" people have the same agenda. Only a small percentage of people normally considered annoying are actually going to try every trick to annoy people for annoyance sake alone. Most have a somewhat narrow agenda. For example, somebody obsessed with religious issues may only be obsessed with religious issues. If you give them a place to vent all that, yet make it filter-able, then more people are happy.
A simpler solution may be to SplitWiki. Controversial stuff simply gets moved to the less formal section.
I don't think all annoying people have the same agenda. In my comment above, I acknowledged that "some of the annoyances come from genuine EditWars". I agree with you that for those people, all that is needed is some space to leave them alone. But that doesn't solve the whole problem. Even though most annoyances come from genuine EditWars, I think it is fair to acknowledge that some amount comes from trolls. If we go through the trouble of picking a solution and magically getting it implemented somehow, then I think we should cover as many bases as possible. -- MichaelSparks
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