The following is my (Joe Beaudoin Jr.’s) own personal opinion… the opinion of my fellow contributors and chiefs may differ.
I’ve been asked by various people why we don’t have our own “mailing list” or “chat room”, or somewhere where Wiki contributors can hang out and discuss Wiki stuff, well, off-wiki. (Just recently, one of our contributors brought up having a “chat room” for contributors, so that was part of the impetus for this blog.)
I’ve also been asked why I’ve been resistant to deploying a forum and completely integrate that into Battlestar Wiki… I’ll reveal why.
I’ve come across this article that reveals what I’ve long suspected about Wikipedia, that it has behind-the-scenes mailing lists whereby top contributors discuss what they’re going to do on Wikipedia in terms of bans, edits, etc. Unfortunately, it uses such channels in a negative manner, which has its community (rightfully) in an uproar.
I’m not going to go into the reasons why we don’t have a chat room or a Battlestar Wiki mailing list, because such tools are ultimately unnecessary in light of the features that MediaWiki provides… moreover, it’s because of what is outlined in the article above.
Yet in the interests of full disclosure, I’ll reveal that we do have a “hidden” forum on Battlestar Forum. I will point out that it is for Frak Media productions, where we discuss new projects and discuss issues that legally (yeah, as in “the law”) can’t be discussed in the open for various reasons. We don’t make decisions on the direction of the Wiki’s content in said “hidden” forum and we sure as hell don’t make decisions there regarding banning people.
In this, I guess you can call me Captain Transparency, because I believe that things that grow in the dark tend to be bad, particularly if left to people without ethics or accountability.
At the same time, I will say that I find that sometimes there are conversations you have to have with people behind closed doors, because there are private, personal things that don’t need to be aired out for public scrutiny… So, really like anything else, it’s not what tools you use, it’s ultimately how you use them. After all, you can use a hammer to bang in a nail… or to smash someone’s skull in. Unfortunately, Wikipedia’s secret mailing list seems to fall under the latter category.
And that’s sad for a tool that’s supposed to “not make people sad” or the “Internet not suck“.
This entry was posted on Tuesday, December 4th, 2007 at 5:27 am and is filed under Drifiting Thoughts. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
I agree with this position completely. This wiki was created to provide information on facts of the series. Their are plenty of chat rooms for bsg. Transparency will mean no harm to the common user and its contibutors.
I ran a Galactica IRC channel for a while. I could bring it back if people want it.
It definitely helps that 99% of our bans/blocks are blatant spammer accounts. That’s mostly due to the fact that 99% of our users are dedicated, good faith contributors. Maybe it’s because we’re so small, but we don’t seem to have nearly the conflict that seems to be at big W, but I’d like to think it’s a testament to the quality of the people (the few, the proud, etc.)
However that means that the other 1% of bans that aren’t blatant spammer accounts are a BIG DEAL, and deserve the full benefit of public scrutiny and discussion, and I think that has been the case. It’s been quite a while since anybody has been banned for non-spam/vandal reasons. In fact, I’m not sure if anybody has been banned for such a reason since the forum has existed…
Wow. I’ve been neck-deep in Wikidrama for the last hour or so, watching Wikipedia ripping itself apart over the aforementioned cabal. This is pretty insane.
I think it’s easy enough to avoid this sort of behavior here on Battlestar Wiki: If a mailing list or chatroom is established, keep it public and easily-available for new editors. Hell, include it in the welcome message that gets put on new editors’ Talk pages.
I also agree that having these things is entirely unnecessary. I may talk more about that later.
We did before had a admin mailing list, but that has been gone for a while since we added the forums. I guess we use the admin list only for verifications of usernames and privacy such. I haven’t seen much activity on it in a while ;x.