Important parts of this discussion are on these pages:
December 10, 2006
Patrick Taylor: I hope this is the right place to suggest corrections. I think we should try to come up with a uniform practice for link creation. Clearly, some terms deserve their own pages, but I also think there are many terms which become undefined pages when they do not need to be. I propose the following:
- A term needs a definition if its meaning is not readily apprent from context.
- If the definition requires more than one diagram to explain or deserves its own discussion, it should be made into a page.
- If the term can be defined by a quick explanation, the text should be made into a footnote.
- Some terms could eventually require their own pages (eg. professional players). In this case, the page should be created with content.
I think that these changes should make pages easier to read. There's no reason a reader should have to navigate away from the page he is reading in order to read a two-line definition. However, this does create redundancy for terms that show up on multiple pages. These, too, could be possibly made into a page to prevent the same text from showing up on many different pages.
May 19, 2003
Charles I suppose the conventions business is always going to be evolutionary; but keeping score seems of some interest. As far as I can see there may be these four categories in which to classify:
Anonymous: Please do not use lines with length greater than 80, it makes the ``diff'' unreadable in the Recent Changes.
Arno Hollosi: That is not always possible. E.g. list items have to be in one line. I have added a quick hack that tries to underline small changes in long lines (e.g. correction of a typo). It works quite well. I hope that solves the problem sufficiently.
Arno Hollosi: I'd like to add that the "no more than four dashes" is questionable. Personally, I just hit '-' a couple of times (or press until auto-repeat sets in).
SGBailey 2003-10-09: Some articles have self links. I could make one here: SLConventions/Discussion. Are these liked, disliked or forbidden? Personally I feel them to be slightly confusing since I perhaps want to click on it and won't go anywhere new.
Sebastian: Even worse are indirect self links: Links to alias pages that eventually link back to the original page. I delete them whenever fall in such a trap. Incidentally, I just did this on Big Eye Liberties.
unkx80: I believe one common reason why this happens is because of Wiki Master Editing, the Wiki Master Editor may copy some contents from page A (containing links to page B) into page B while forgetting to remove the links.
Sebastian: I'm really happy about the prompt and concise replies I get from many people here, above all from Bill and CharlesMatthews. I feel very much inclined to add "thanks" below each of them, but nobody else does this - and rightly so, because it would clutter up SL. Often I subliminate that urge and add another comment/question instead, which contributes to my recent changes addiction, because I have to see if someone responded again ... :-)
My question is: What's the best way to express thanks or should we simply forget about it?
Charles Well, thanks for that! This is a wiki, not a mutual appreciation society. Those who want to put something back into SL can do it in some way that suits them: maintain older pages, bring new questions.
Sebastian: Well, then, I won't publicly appreciate you.
A related question is: How to treat signed contributions in non-discussion pages? - See Document Mode vs Thread Mode.