User talk:Big Mike

What is going on? World Blogs Clogs Elections The Bar (talk) (talk) (talk) (talk) (hic) Welcome to RationalWiki, Big Mike! Check out our guide for newcomers and our community standards! Tell us how you found RationalWiki here! If you are interested in contributing: Read what our articles are intended to be Check out the to-do list See our help page and Wikipedia's formatting cheatsheet If writing a new article, consider writing up a draft And most importantly: Pull up a goat and have some fun!

Big MIke - a chance to show what you can offer. RIGHT NOW. At Gandhi. Carptrash 23:43, 20 November 2008 (EST)

Don't worry about Carp. He's a little testy at the moment. --Arcan ¡ollǝɥ 23:44, 20 November 2008 (EST)

Okay, thanks. Big Mike 23:49, 20 November 2008 (EST)

Sympathetic view point

Have a look at WikiInfo they have adopted the "sympathetic view point" modus operand, which is very similar to what you are advocating. Explore some of their rules and user patterns and I am sure you can avoid some of their mistakes. tmtoulouse 23:51, 20 November 2008 (EST)

Another good resource meatball wiki. tmtoulouse 23:53, 20 November 2008 (EST)

Thanks for the pointers tmtoulouse. I'll go look. Big Mike 23:54, 20 November 2008 (EST)

Okay, I read about the sympathetic point of view. It has some ideas in it I may steal, but I (and I am alone so far) like the idea of allowing multiple points of view (with many of the same caveats made by wikinfo). Wikinfo seems to be a response to WP:NPOV, whereas mine is a response to WP:POVFORK. As a parrallel, I find it more interesting to read a conservative newspaper article along side a liberal article on the same event, along side a crank newspaper article. All have information worth considering. Longterm, diffing between POVs will be a feature I hope to add. By POV, I don't mean, as wikinfo seems to encourage, inserting commentary into an article. I mean, for example, writing an article on the Grey Partridge from a game bird point of view, from a biologic point of view, and from a bird watching point of view, allowing each POV to order the article as they see fit, including the right to copy whatever information they want from the other articles. Another instance would be Homeopathic dilutions, with an article written from the homeopathy POV, and another from the scientific POV. Each article will have to have a template mentioning the existence of other versions of the article, linking back to the main content fork page.

The major problems I see are:

1. Competing for contributors with wikinfo (I hadn't known they existed), wikipedia, conservapedia.
2. Keeping troublemakers at bay.
3. Dealing with individuals who claim, for example, the conservative point of view, to the exclusion of others. (My initial thought on this is to have two articles, favoring neither.)

But Wikinfo's solution does sound like it will take up less server space. But disk drives are cheap.

BTW, is this site hosted on a shared virtual server, or a dedicated server? At about how many users did you have to switch, if the later? Big Mike 00:17, 21 November 2008 (EST)

Hi Big Mike. I'm afraid that I've got no technical info for you. :-( Just a slightly negative thought. Your main problem I think is going to be getting a new core group of contributors which is both sufficiently large, sufficiently interested and sufficiently diverse. CP started off being written by AS's homeschooled kids - so he had a captive group whom he could simply tell to write articles. RW benefited from having a core group of wiki-savy, like-minded individuals who were initially motivated to edit CP and then were expelled as a group. In fact we continue to get a steady trickle of ex CP editors.

I do however think the idea is very good, as it's always interesting to read well written article which has a POV different to your own - so once you get it going it could well be a success. It's getting it off the ground that will be your problem and I can't see an easy way to do it at the moment.--Bob^{bing up} 10:16, 21 November 2008 (EST)

We are currently running on a mid range virtual private server, these days a VPS can handle most website serving until you get to the traffic range that you need to be building your own multi-server system. On the other hand if you meant a "shared hosting account" and not a VPS those are immensely inadequate for MediaWiki software. MediaWiki makes an absurd number of mysql queries and you will eat of CPU cycles very fast. Shared hosting probably supports about 20 active users total.

You want a service that won't cut off your website when you reach max CPU but instead just slow things down for your site, and if you plan to be editing around the MW software and database a lot than you are going to want full ssh capability and probably root access to your server. RW is on servint, and I they have been a good provider giving me all the tools I need to keep the site going. Much of it is not for the "novice" but if you know your way around at least the basic GUI in cpanel server and what not you should be fine.

I would recommend surfing through Meat Ball wiki on your spare time, it is a wiki about wikis and online communities. It talks about all the various stages they can go through, about starting off, about tipping points, what kills communities, etc. It is a very handy resource for people trying to manage cats. tmtoulouse 11:32, 21 November 2008 (EST)