OffTopic

MeatballWiki | RecentChanges | Random Page | Indices | Categories

OffTopic: not talking about what others are talking about; talking about a topic that is not part of the MissionStatement.

See CommunityWiki:OnAndOffTopic, see also OnTopic

What are wikis? There is all inclusiveness written in their concept. Potentially everybody can take part. The wabisabi and yggdrasil. Wikis have problems these days with spammers and some with trolls, sorry with "DifficultPerson?"s too. Why is that.

The all inclusiveness in the concept does not apply all over yet. We do not practize it in our behaviour on wiki. - That is the problem.

Wiki is all inclusive. Everything that potentially exists exists on it, it just has not been written/spammed. Say the world would consist of your house and garden only. In your garden you have a pond, with bugs and toads around it. You happen to have a bug here and now flying into your living room, but that's no real problem. You even saw one of the toads on the terrace once but they are very shy.

Now for any reason you decide to make a concrete parking place out of your garden. As your house and your garden is the world and neither toads nor bugs can escape to the neighbors garden or anywhere else you have bugs hundredwise in your living room and discover toads in your bed.

What can you do to prevent this? You can hape a new place for bugs and toads to escape to. You can enlarge your world. This unguarded part pf your world could be OffTopic + all the subpages that ever want to get created and deleted there. A MetaBaby within the WikiBody?. Within every wikiCell. There is a MetaBaby even in you, know. Changes on OffTopic should be minor changes always, so they would not disturb the major recent changes, We face the problem with peaople creating shallow test pages from the Sandbox. Created as subpages of OffTopic they could do so without disturbing us on major recent changes. -- MattisManzel

Why are you using RecentChanges to read the wiki? RecentChanges is the least interesting way to use a wiki. If you are only interested in RecentChanges, WebLogs are a better medium.

I don't agree that wikis are inclusive. That's like saying a room is inclusive. Just because it is physically true that anyone can walk through an UnlockedDoor that doesn't mean they are invited to. This line of argument--physical architecture equals social reality--implies logically that it is legitimate to put locks and barricades in every physical (or virtual) environment so that the architectural limitations encode and enact the social limitations, and since social groups are by nature not practicing RadicalInclusiveness, this would lead to more HardSecurity. The problem with HardSecurity is that it will never exactly match the perceived social limitations, particularly since it is often non-negotiable whereas social limitations are negotiable. -- SunirShah

We will let them do a bit on OffTopic and its subpages, but we will get on their nerves, deleting the worst stuff until they realize: only when admin you can really decide. Poor spammers ;) They will even try to make their own wikis and fail. -- MattisManzel

I don't understand from the above what is OffTopic, but perhaps I can rely on the MissionStatement. -- AndriusKulikauskas

This is merely a general discussion of the concept of off-topicness on wikis. The MeatballMission is indeed a better place to start. -- SunirShah

CategoryConflict CategoryJargon

OffTopic

Discussion