User talk:ABC

Just want to say

Be careful about marking pages for deletion... ED upgraded to the latest MediaWiki recently, and it looks like some non-English pages might've been accidentally deleted. Until we figure out what's going on (and this could take a while, since ED is very busy), I'd rather not delete any of those pages that redirect to foreign-language pages that currently don't seem to exist... because they might have existed once.

Anyway, welcome to PandoraWiki! You've made a lot of nice edits recently. What prompted you to come over here suddenly? Was there a discussion on the German forums? Esn 05:58, 20 April 2011 (MEST)

Hi there, sure I pay attention if the content is outdated or just a stub or (in my opinion) is badly named. I agree thats hard to decide for non english articles, but as this is a wiki, I decided to be gritty. Thats why I just marked them to delete and a second admin should decide if it's nesessary. If I did anything wrong feel free to drop me a note and to revert my changes.

No there wasn't a discussion at the german boards. I come over from the OpenStreetMap project, where I do wiki cleanup, too. Guess this is my faith to help to document OpenSource projects ;) And course my bachelor thesis is nearly finished, I decided to put some more attention on the Pandora :) --ABC 07:55, 20 April 2011 (MEST)

Regarding "if you did anything wrong", the main thing I don't like currently is that you're copy+pasting templates from Wikipedia that look ugly here because some of the elements are missing. For example, this one. Please just remove the missing elements & redlinks unless you're planning to bring them over as well (and honestly, we're much smaller than Wikipedia here; we don't NEED all the stuff that they have. If the community is small, it can be more efficient to have fewer rules.). Esn 00:53, 22 April 2011 (MEST)

Case in point: instead of just putting "merge" templates on pages that you want to move (as you did on Extend Utils, Emulator compression support, InfoIndex), why not start a discussion topic on the relevant talk pages discussing your reasons and proposals? If you just post a template, nobody has any idea about why you want to do it. Esn 01:43, 22 April 2011 (MEST)

A few more thoughts... what you've done with organizing the existing information here has been very valuable. The categories, for example - it's no secret that the category structure here has been a bit messy. I would urge you to be a bit more hesitant, though, in organizing future information - that is, information that doesn't exist yet. Some people tried that in the past, for example here... well, those pages were accidentally deleted with the latest update, so you can't see them right now (unless ED manages to figure out what went wrong), but basically an editor created a complicated structure for emulator compatibility lists... which nobody ended up using, because it was too complex to read or update. A prerequisite for any structure is that somebody has to be willing to put content into it - if nobody is, then that structure is dead weight.

Unstructured content is more valuable than contentless structure.

So basically, I ask that before you copy things over from Wikipedia, you take a bit of time to think about if they're suitable for this particular project - if there's a need for them. Maybe ask people. Some of them are - and lots aren't. If you are willing to use them to add some content to the wiki, then that's the best of all. ;) Esn 07:03, 22 April 2011 (MEST)