OnePersonAgainstTheMountain

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A common complaint amongst those foreign to wikis is that they get lost in the PageDatabase. Even this site has around 800 pages as of January 1, 2001, which is a daunting read. Imagine if you were hurled at www.widgets.com and asked to retrieve information on the Widget Pro 2000 from a site that large.

Many people feel a more informative and guideful front page would be helpful. Others would even like a wiki syntax cheat sheet at the bottom of the edit page. Even a help page link on each page would help. Others think that more IndexingSchemes will help do the trick. Tough problem.

See also Wiki:WikiIceberg.

I was actually thinking more of presenting opinions counter to the majority consensus on the wiki. -- JasonYip

You mean like GroupThink and GroupShift?? Or like on Wiki, where the majority consensus is often quiet. Everyone on a wiki has a veto. They are only checked by others with their vetos. If people don't exercise involvement, they de facto empower others with divergent viewpoints. But this is true not just on wikis, but in all anarchic organizations/communities. -- SunirShah

I think that page count isn't a real problem. WardsWiki has about 14500 pages now (Mar 2001) and it could be put in order easily by its system of categories and by improved roadmaps. I think that new wikis should be planned and ordered from the beginning. I've put a number of additional links in the link bar of my wikis: "persons", "projects", "index" and "categories". And a "TestPage" link reduces testing noise. It's maybe a bit of an overkill. But I do this e.g. on DseWiki and it seems to work. -- HelmutLeitner

The experience described would be better be named "InformationOverload" or "drinking from the firehose". -- DaveJacoby

OnePersonAgainstTheMountain

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