I have no problem with the Village pump concept. Be that as it may, there is a difficulty which arises, and which has arisen before with other similarly motivated pages. There is no mechanism for cleaning them up! Because of that the articles just keep getting longer and longer with series of unrelated topics until a frustrated somebody starts a new page with a new title, but the same old questions.
Moving discussion from a topic talk page to the Village pump to promote the use of the Village pump is probably not a good idea. Once the pump is primed those transfers should be removed lest they become like weeds that clog the pipe connecting the pump with its aquifer.
This is a sanitation problem. There needs to be a mechanism for keeping the pump clean. EVERY entry should be dated. (Can it be done automatically without the four tildes?) Then after an agreed period of time it should be unceremoniously dumped. I suggest one week from the last edit for textual material, and one month when a response is nothing more than a link to another article. The limits would be separately applied to each subject in the pump. The week would be enoough time for any old hand to create a link to a more appropriate page, and to make the changes he feels are needed at that page.
If a deletion policy is clearly put at the head of the page and applied strictly nobody can complain that their views were censored out. If no old hand creates links, it can be assumed that they weren't worth making. Eclecticology 12:45 Aug 23, 2002 (PDT)
- Yes, it is getting muddy around the old pump. Anything useful here ought to be moved into the proper page, such as the forthcoming Wikipedia:Manual of Style or somewhere appropriate in the Wikipedia:Public domain resources or whatever. Some of these things may just be bug reports to be filed. It's up to the attentive to keep the pump moving along. If there's something useful, it could be moved to its own page with just a link left behind. Ortolan88 13:46 Aug 23, 2002 (PDT)
- Great idea. How about writing up the cleanup polciy for permanent inclusion at the top of the page, and then doing an initial cleanup? This can work, but it takes an experienced regular to know where good info should be moved, and what can be deleted. The pump could then start pumping information into stable articles like the FAQ, Manual of Style, etc. --Karl Juhnke
How about putting Village pump questions at the top of the list? That way, new questions are easier to find. Ortolan88
- The convention for talk pages (see Wikipedia:Talk page) is that new questions/comments should go at the bottom of the page. I think we should follow that convention for this page too, to avoid confusion.
As with talk pages, there are arguments for putting new comments at the top (as you rightly point out, new questions are a bit more obvious) and there are also good arguments for adding new comments at the bottom (it is easier to follow what is going on in chronological order). At the end of the day it is like deciding which side of the road to drive on - it doesn't matter too much what the convention is, as long as everyone sticks to the same convention. The established convention for talk pages is new comments go at the bottom, so we should use that here too to avoid confusion and get new users used to the convention. Enchanter
- If so, we should be quicker to edit Village pump, eliminating stale questions, placing useful material in a better place (I will be moving the Gutenberg thing to a new section about using Gutenberg linked from Wikipedia:Public domain resources, and basically keeping it lively and useful. If there isn't an obvious place to put a useful but aging answer, why not just give it its own article and link from the Village pump? Ortolan88
- How about putting new topics at the top but answers in any topic should be added at the bottom of the topic. Eclecticology 13:06 Aug 31, 2002 (PDT)