User talk:Shadowphoenix/GWW Opinions

Purpose

I'm actually wondering about the whole purpose of this "project". Can I ask why you believe we need a subpage for rants (despite calling it "opinions")? You know exactly how rant pages will end up. Have you given thought on how you plan on handling less-than-civil comments? Do you really want to "police" all these pages? This is user space content, so it's probably going to monitored or noticed much less by other active users.

If a user's opinion is in the minority and he/she cannot convince other users to see things in the same way, do we really want to encourage dissenters to band together and voice out in one place? The momentum of gathered rants tends to build up and blow up quite quickly, as seen in many forums. I am concerned that this will degenerate into something akin to Izzy's talk page when it comes to touchy subjects.

I find it more useful to encourage users to raise issues in the relevant pages themselves, rather than gathering complaints in one central location. If you don't like a policy, raise it on the policy page. Regardless of how it turns out, at least the talk page stays in context. I do not believe that giving users a place to vent their frustration will help matters; in fact, I think it will aggravate things should they post in anger. This is particularly true for users and guild pages. Negative comments, ranted indirectly, will often be taken quite personally. Users should resolve differences directly, on their own user pages, not to have a centralised ranting page that indirectly encourages insults. If you have a problem with another user, take it to him on his talk page, not rant about it somewhere else; it's just going to create more ill feelings. In all likelihood, the person you rant about won't even know it.

With that said, I am not yet fully opposed to your idea, because I think I get what you're aiming for. It's just that I see a very strong likelihood for this to backfire. -- ab.er.rant 08:23, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

That is the point of the disclaimer on top of all pages in this project,"All pages that violate policy will be marked for speedy deletion". This is not to support trolling or any such thing, it is a place for serious users to express their opinions on certain subjects. Who knows, the project may backfire and if so I will end it; but we wont know till we try ;) --Shadowphoenix 08:33, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

I'm not necessarily opposed to this - plus who cares if I were? - but I do have one question: what purpose do you see these pages serving beyond the talk pages for all the relevant issues themselves? What niche is this project filling that the existing system does not? I'm just a little unclear in that regard, as it seems to me like most of the concerns voiced herein could be just as ably addressed elsewhere. What am I missing? - THARKUN 09:42, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

Shadow, this is a sort of double edged sword, for it to be successful people would have to feel uncensored, however because it is in your userspace you can U1 speedy anything you like and thus hold it to ransom a bit, but this sort of needs to happen to avoid mass trolling, so rock -- this project -- hard place. To be honest this is seems to me to be a project for the sake of having a project. This effectively happens already all over the place on different talk pages which are relevant to specific topics anyway, and having it centralised here just seems unnecessary to me. --Lemming 14:09, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

I personally would also have a problem in speedying those pages with U1 as they are mostly built up with content not written by the "owning"-user. poke | talk 14:35, 23 March 2008 (UTC)

I believe I also know where you hope this goes, however, I would rather that you create a page that helps to educate users, especially new users, in the community aspects of the wiki. The fact that every user has a voice in policy, and in guidelines, and in voting, etc. Rather than have a separate project for people to voice their opinions on policy, they should be encouraged to voice their opinions and suggestions for changes on policy talk pages, that are monitored for NPA, etc. There is a widespread perception that policies are written in stone, and determined solely by administrators, and that is where 'Community Education' pages could really make a positive contribution. I also agree with poke that once started, these pages would no longer qualify for speedy deletion.-- Wynthyst 00:19, 24 March 2008 (UTC)