Wikipedia talk:Workpages

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• Ah, thanks for creating this. Will be useful to point people to in future. Cheers, Moreschi (talk) 13:11, 11 September 2008 (UTC)

Reflect disablement of subpages in main namespace

Given that the subpage feature has been turned off in the main article namespace, shouldn't this article be updated accordingly? I gather it's no longer appropriate, for example for someone wanting the create article Foo to write a draft at Foo/draft because Foo/draft is now the name of a top-level article rather than a subpage of a page called Foo. —Largo Plazo (talk) 21:30, 31 December 2009 (UTC)

Workpages are dangerous and should be avoided

I was looking for an essay that argues that point, yet I cannot find it. Wikipedia:Do not use subpages is the closest I can arrive at, and it is an old, old discussion about why we don't use structure like Solar System/Earth.

The point I want to argue is in particular one which Wikipedia:Subpages suggests this page (Wikipedia:Workpages) is making (but in fact doesn't). Bear with me, I'll explain what I mean :) Wikipedia:Do_not_use_subpages#Disallowed_uses states:

Writing drafts of major article revisions, e.g., Example Article/Temp in the main namespace, as you can get there accidentally using special:randompage — write these in the talk namespace, e.g. Talk:Example Article/Temp. See Wikipedia:Workpages for detail

Wikipedia:Workpages doesn't mention "Writing drafts of major article revisions", but has a similar argument: "[Workpage is a] page associated with a specific article is useful in cases where an article is already reasonably developed (say, better than "Start") and as such can suffer deterioration by addition of sub-standard material. Such material can contain useful references or quotes that could, with some effort, be worked into the article to its benefit, but may make the article less useful to the reader when added inexpertly, or in the context of dubious editorializing."

In my 5+ years on English and other wikis, I have come to see workpages - whether in mainspace, discussion space or userspace - as ineffcient at best, dangerous at worst. Why? Well, wikis operate on principle of "many eyes catching the bug", and many editors improving drafts one step at a time. Workpages are different, as they have, on purpose, low visibility. For obvious reasons, they are not linked from main article. Often, such workpages are not announced on article's discussion pages, particularly when they are a pet project of one editor who works on them in his userspace. Even if announced on a discussion page, the announcement may be missed by watchers, and most editors of an article usually don't look at the discussion page anyway. Hence workspaces are rarely used by anybody but the editor who created it. Individual editors often give up on such projects, and thus their effort is wasted. Instead, if they added their draft work to the main article, it would be much more likely to be seen by others, reviewed/commented on and improved.

Tellingly, this article has examples of 5 workpages/dumping grounds, none of which has been edited a week / months after they were created (they all come from 2006-2008, so we can safely say they have not been edited for years). As such, they are perfect examples of why creating workspace subpages for article drafts/rewrites is a waste of time (I could add some more exmaples from my own wiki experience, when I discovered such drafts, often in userspace of inactive editors, and rescued them by moving them to mainspace where they have begun their normal life, years after they should have been able to do so).

Working in a draftspace shows the mentality of "my work is not good enough to be seen publicly, I need to improve it". Such mentality is counter to how Wikipedia. Almost all drafts are acceptable in mainspace. The only two exceptions I can see is, first, a "to do" list - but that belongs on a discussion page. Second one - a major rewrite - is a very rare occurrence, and even that should probably take place in the article, so other editors can see and comment on it, not be started on some subpage, creating a fork.

A final inspiration for my critique of workspaces is this recent essay on teaching with Wikipedia, where three collaborators agree that educational projects should encourage students to contribute to mainspace, not to userspace drafts (search for "Many instructors who design" paragraph for their full argument).

As such, I'd like to make a case in this essay that creating workpages for drafts is strongly discouraged. Would there be any objections to this (if so, I'll create my counter essay). --_{Piotr Konieczny aka Prokonsul Piotrus| talk} 19:55, 11 June 2010 (UTC)

It isn't necessarily because "'my work is not good enough to be seen publicly, I need to improve it'". Just throwing information into an article, especially if its well established, is likely to be reverted. However if is collected elsewhere, it provides an opportunity to bring it up to an acceptable level, or to decide against it (i.e. "may or may not be incorporated into an article"). User:Godsy/AaNotableUsage is a page I use in this manner. Sure, I could put in a more public place, but for me a work page provides a place to collect rawer information than is acceptable for an article. I do it less publicly so the edit history of Adam's ale edit history isn't forked. It's better for attribution purposes this way. If I solely work on an addition in my userspace and add it to the article, its all my contribution still, so the history that's lost from the copy and past doesn't really matter. In the unlikely event that others contributed such raw material to my page as I am it wouldn't matter because it is so raw (i.e. basically just quotes from sources). I would discourage anyone else from actively doing firmer drafting there, but not from using the information per se.— Godsy ^(TALK_CONT) 04:18, 4 October 2016 (UTC)