Board Thread:Wiki Discussion/@comment-1370845-20141227162737/@comment-25309944-20141227181215

I respectfully oppose this motion for several reasons. Notably, that it is a useful (and in some ways, unique) feature which is still being used by this community for many different purposes, from organizing fiction to dealing with community issues, to simply having fun with polls, questions, etc. It is a means by which we express ourselves as individuals within the community.

What's more, I do not believe in limiting the behavior of members of our community beyond actions that can be considered harassment and which are destructive to the mainspace.

It is true that this is a wiki, and that a wiki needs executive action in order to carry out its purpose - delivering reliable content - but it has been proven time and again that Sporewiki is much more than that. The existence of the fictionverse, fantasyverse, BNW, IRC, proves that Sporewiki is also a community. These elements operate on rules separate from the mainspace - and wholly different from most wikis (the fact that a user can 'own' content would come as a surprise to most wiki editors). The fictionspace does not exist to deliver accurate content, but because we have built it for our own enjoyment, and we have erected a community around it. Let us remember that the vast majority of edits on Sporewiki are now in the fictionspace rather than in the namespace.

It then follows that, if Sporewiki is part-wiki, part-community, aspects of it do not operate on the same imperatives of efficiency and accuracy as regular wikis do. If this change were to only affect the mainspace, I would have no problem at all with it, because it is just that - efficient and logical. However, this will also impact the community as a whole. It should be the guiding principle of community leaders - both online and in the real world - to expand the options and means of expression of their members while still keeping them safe, not limit them by setting down an arbitrary standard for what is the 'correct' way to interact with the community, as several arguments above have done.

My last point addresses the redundancy of blogs with the existence of forums. I respectfully disagree with this point for a simple reason: they do not work the same. While they are both a method of expression and communication among users, they engender different kinds and quality of communication. For one, blogs are much more visible and can be seen democratically all over the wiki no matter who posted them, while only admins have the ability to highlight threads in the forums.

Second, there is a very useful feature in the comment section of blogs which is conspicuously missing from the forum: the ability to reply to a comment directly. This is essential to maintaining a conversation on a blog, allowing users to reply directly to another user's arguments, criticism, ideas, etc. Without it, the forumspace is essentially a very long list of micro-essays which almost nobody bothers to read properly because there's too much text. So I will submit that forums and blogs are not redundant and actually work rather differently, and that we should not eliminate one for the other because there might be users (like myself) who actually prefer blogs as a means of expression and discourse. Having the blog feature available to the wider community, in my opinion, hurts nobody, and can only give our members more tools by which to do fiction, manage events, and have a good time on this website which we all call home. And that, I believe, is the greatest thing we can offer them.