User blog:Vyrolan/Are Incomplete Pages Bad?

Sam made this comment on BBilge's blog post which struck me as a very odd:

"You must understand we can't have an incomplete table on a mainspace page."

Why not?

That's the very nature of a Wiki...it's always evolving, it's always improving. If you put something out there incomplete, you are encouraging others to get involved and help finish it. People will add/improve little pieces...that's the whole point of a wiki. You leverage all of the users that may just make a tiny edit, but lots of tiny edits add up to something special. Certainly in the past the wiki has never had this position of "incomplete is bad". As the wiki has grown, lots of stuff has been missing, wrong, or otherwise incomplete/incorrect. A lot of people have done a lot of work to fix those things up and fill them in. It's made this wiki a much better place.

Also, there are still "incomplete" stuff in the "mainspace". When a new Ability Details page is created, it's essentially just blank...or it just has the animations and that's it. Then piece by piece, people fill it in after testing things. That's the way the Wiki should work. A starting point is created by someone and everyone works it out from there.

Now I can see the point of forums/project pages/etc. when you're organizing something like the Ability Details project since it's a LOT of pages, a LOT of content, and a LOT of work. But that page is just for organization, not execution. What seems to have been proposed for BBilge's work was to create a whole separate page just for the sake of not having something incomplete out there. If you hide all of the in-progress stuff, normal users won't find it. You surely don't want to put on the page "This page is currently being redesigned...go HERE to see the current iteration of the redesign." since that would obviously be silly and everyone would just instantly click through assuming the partially-redone page is "better" since it's newer.

So I guess my original question remains: Why not? It makes no sense to me. This is a wiki not some kind of textbook that can only publish after countless copy editors have checked it over and over and over again.

Vyrolan 17:21, April 25, 2011 (UTC)