User:Pier4r/Draft

This is for storing draft to be copied in very popular pages that are subjects to a lot of editing in the same day.

Wikipedia: contributions, guidelines, interpretations, social rules and decisions
Hello everyone! Well i don't know if this contribution of mine here is really related to the topic, it is a matter of interpretation. I don't have so much experience about the wikipedia editor community (nor i think that one needs a certain amount of it before interacting with the existing community, because how can the wikipedia editor experience could be measured in a not naive way?), but nevertheless i tried, at first, to interact properly and to make proper contributions.

So for example i ended in the reference desk to discuss about some topics to get a bit more knowledge, instead of, i don't know, using a Q&A website. The reference desk is nice but it seems obvious to me that the visibility of some questions is very short-lived, since they are archived; and archives rarely gets activity, indeed they are archives (again, for my perception. Everyone can speak only through his perception).

Then, when i thought i had some possible (minor) contributions to add to some articles, my content was disputed. That is completely ok, i don't want to appear like a person that says 'what i add is important and should be kept', nevertheless the way it was disputed was a bit discouraging. Therefore i thought about a more conservative approach, because we don't have infinite resources to contribute, thus using our effort in a more effective way is more rewarding, and without rewards (mainly psychological in this case) no one does nothing, in my opinion. One way is using first the talk page for several activities (hopefully i will enumerate some of them later).

So i read about the policies of the talk page and i realize the actual mess about policies and 'real' talk pages. For example, as far as i understood, the talk page is to talk about issues of the current page, not to talk extensively about the content or about personal point of view. But talk pages (especially the ones related to popular pages) are completely filled with personal opinions, or non-arguments even during disputes, like 'ah, three editors agree with me, and you are alone, you are wrong then' (argumentum ad populum, moreover related to a limited time visibility of the dispute).

So on one side i have policies that seem reasonable (to me), on the other side it seems, to me, that the actual usage of wikipedia talk pages is far away from the policies. Furthermore one can realize even that this is a matter of interpretation. Who said if i follow a policy or not? Or who said that the reference desk is better to discuss a topic instead of the talk page on that topic? Could be, for example, that the input in a talk page will be useful to lead to a better article. Or could be that someone that poses a question in the topic's talk page gains more information compared to the same question posed in the reference desk, because the ones interested in the topic are more likely to watch the page and the talk page rather than the reference desk.

In addition to this there is the policy about original research, or also the policy about 'how can we value a source', and so on and so forth. If the wikipedia's user base would follow those policies, would be laughable for a professor to say 'wikipedia is not realiable' because wikipedia would be quite strict. Anyway this is again my interpretation of the policies, maybe i read them in a too strict and utopian way.

Still, for my current understanding of wikipedia and its potential, seems more reasonable to discuss something related to a topic through its talk page, if possible in a compact way (this entry, for example, fails to be compact). I meant discussion in a broad sense: discussion about the content, discussion about possible additions, discussion about the topic itself, etc... Also due to the 'unwritten' rule that seems followed by the majority of editors here: if your contribution on the topic's page does not reach consensus (and again, the consensus policy seems reasonable while the actual practice for me it is not, because anyone has a 'veto' power), it is removed, even without discussion in the talk page ; while if your contribution is in the talk page, maybe everyone will disagree with you but few of them will edit what you wrote.

That is, for me, more rewarding, because the effort does not vanish immediately in an archive/version-history page (again, also version-history pages have very little activity/visibility).

Or could be that i completely missed the track, well, it happens. PS: i'm sorry for grammar errors, feel free to point them out :).