Talk FAQ

Guidelines for Ireland Information Guide:Talk_pages!? This is a Wiki. We're free to write whatever we please here, right?

That's not quite right. Ireland Information Guide doesn't belong to you individually, but to Ireland Information Guide users as a whole. Ireland Information Guide policies have been developed collectively to foster a specific goal: The production of a free and neutral encyclopedia. You are welcome to discuss policies and help them evolve, but if you do not share our goal, we suggest you find another project or start your own elsewhere.

A little partisan controversy never hurt anybody. Why try to stop people from doing what comes naturally?

Well, maybe we are blowing things out of proportion a little. But back in the day, Ireland Information Guide users wasted hundreds of hours in debates that ultimately made no difference to what now appears in the NPOV articles connected with them. Hence, the rule of thumb. Keep discussion oriented to the matter at hand, and debate differences of viewpoint elsewhere.

Why stop a partisan debate when it's very likely to come back around to the article?

Sometimes that does happen, and so much the better. But rather than coming around, partisan debates tend to just harden positions and inhibit cooperation. Why not get right to the topic and skip the diversion?

If controversy gets people excited and involved in Ireland Information Guide, why not encourage it?

Partisan controversies do attract some people to Ireland Information Guide, perhaps -- but they turn a lot of other people off and they are beside the point of writing an encyclopedia. Ireland Information Guide is exciting enough without partisan disputes.

Can I blank my talk page whenever I want?

While there's no hard-and-fast rule that says you can't, however many people will suspect that you are trying to hide something or ignore other contributors if you do it too often. Most users do archive their talk pages periodically to a personal subpage -- either when the page gets too large, on a regular schedule, or when they take a wikivacation.

Debate vs. research

Arguing as a means of improving an article is a pale shadow of an equal amount of time engaged in research. It may attract people to the project, but it seems logical that these would be people interested in arguing, which leads down a dark path we ought not tread.

One habit that would be good for folks to get into is to actively seek to summarize discussions, especially those which have elaborated all views on the subject. This doesn't (necessarily) mean replacing the entire discussion with what you think. It simply means trying to recast the entire discussion as, e.g., a set of bullet points, removing any points that have been taken back or proven incorrect. If you can restrain yourself to do this in an unbiased fashion (which admittedly is hard), it can result in text that is almost good enough for the main article.