User:Andrewa/andrewpedia
 | This is an essay. It contains the advice or opinions of one or more Wikipedia contributors. This page is not an encyclopedia article, nor is it one of Wikipedia's policies or guidelines, as it has not been thoroughly vetted by the community. Some essays represent widespread norms; others only represent minority viewpoints. |
 | This page in a nutshell: Just some ways I'd build an online encyclopedia that differ a little from Wikipedia, if I were building my own |
In that all pages belong to the whole project, any user may edit this one. But it's generally more helpful (and polite) to discuss the proposed change on its talk page first.
Behavior
[edit]No personal attacks
[edit]This seems to have been watered down in practice (without the policy having changed). I think that's nothing short of tragic.
Admin accountability
[edit]I think admins should be held to higher standards of behaviour but only when acting as admins.
Similarly we should expect a higher standard of knowledge of policies and procedures, but again only when acting as an admin. Most if not all admins specialise to some degree, because it's quite impossible to be up to date in all areas. They should make sure they are fully up to date in areas in which they exercise admin powers. But having these powers shouldn't disqualify them from acting as a contributor in other areas, improving articles, commenting in discussions and so on.
Article titles
[edit]The issues below are all debated by many with religious zeal, at no advantage to the encyclopedia.
Primary topic
[edit]It would do no harm to do away with Primary Topic altogether, and disambiguate every ambiguous title.
That's not going to happen, and is a lot of work and probably more trouble than it's worth anyway. But a lesser proposal that achieves almost as much would be very easily implemented, at little cost.
Diacritics and special characters
[edit]We should use alphamerics including upper and lower case, plus blank, as our article title character set. Nothing more is necessary. In the article text, use whatever characters we want. But not in the title which creates the URL of the page. Keep it simple.
Capital letters
[edit]We should for example use Brown Snake to refer to the (Australian) Eastern Brown Snake. That makes it clear that it's not just any snake that happens to be brown, nor is it necessarily brown (some brownies come out of hibernation quite black and very nasty).