A short summary of the wiki universe in 20 minutes

Kim Bruning. (English Wikipedia)

I can try, can't I? ;-)

This workshop is an extension of ye olde Wikipedia:Lectures, so it'll be structured in roughly the same way. Which is to say: Very Wiki, or: Very Chaotic, depending on which crowd you belong to :-P

I'll walk through this very quickly so we can establish common ground.

Game Theory

tit for tat is a good stratagem. Documented on wikipedia as WP:AGF

Let's not get into this too deeply. Take home message: Making hard rules has unexpected results. (I don't have time to write a cellular automaton to demo simulated annealing though; and besides, playing with this stuff can take days anyway :-P )

Documented at WP:IAR. (Alternate: Gödel's incompleteness theorems)

Our Agile inheritence

The world's first wiki

File:Wikiwikiweb1994.jpg

WikiWikiWeb page from 1994

WikiWikiWeb: (no talk, no userspace)

you can link to it using [[WikiWikiWeb:]]

TL;DR:

Wikipedia policy in a nutshell:

Things people don't expect

Other people unexpectedly edit 'your' pages!

Founding issues are not what you expect

WP:NOR , WP:RS are not part of meta:Founding principles

As written, voting is not permitted!

I wonder how many people don't expect that ;-)

WP:POLL, (WP:NOT)

Subject Matter Experts get short shrift

WP:NOR, WP:BLP, but especially WP:COI , WP:POV

(note: COI and BLP conflict in awful ways. I can't fix a top-down policy like BLP, it's too involved. But that's a discussion for tomorrow)

Potential Questions

How did "old fashioned" wikis get anything done?
which is faster, mainspace or userspace? (1. What is it? 2. Why is it notable? 3. at least one reference)
which policies prevent new submissions?
How do I decide something without voting?
"who is in charge"? (governance)
how can we fix the SME problem? (I'll have to ask you folks :-) )

how other stuff works/ workshop things

Some of this is enwiki specific:

WP:BRD Bold, Revert Discuss
WP:POINT Don't disrupt wikipedia to make a point (2 elements!)
WP:IAR Ignore all Rules.
WP:CON Consensus

Tips after talk

check out Equity
Cellular Automaton Software [2]

More