Styles and content types
Hi Jesse,
Yeah -- WE is a unique community in many respects. It's fascinating to compare how policies and procedures evolve among different wiki communities.
The user namespace is the best place for private content (where folk don't want anyone else editing). The downside for newbies is that this requires knowledge of the subpage syntax --- which arguably is a more "advanced" wiki skill than creating a new page in the wiki. I'm sure that if we put our minds to this -- we would find a smart technical solution to tackle the issue -- namely making it very easy for users to distinguish between public and 'private" pages. Perhaps something for our usability project with the NZ Ministry of education to take on board.
Good on you for sticking to your guns on stressing the importance of style guidelines :-). Ultimately -- if educators do not believe or support the ideals of quality education -- they're not true educators and I suspect that they're not going to be well aligned with our community vision and goals.
I think the important message here (which we all seem to agree on) is to make sure that we find ways to welcome and support educators on their road / apprenticeship in becoming active contributors to our vision for widening and increasing access to high quality free content materials.
Cheers
