I realized we probably need an official policy on article ownership. Until recently all pages in the main namespace have been common property, free for anyone to edit. After Beyond Earth was launched we've received some strategy guides from our users, which is great! The issue, however, is that a couple of the guides are in the main namespace, yet are claimed by their authors in the page title.
I find this very awkward: should I or should I not edit them? Fix spelling errors? Add missing links? Add missing icons? Where to draw the line? This basically leads me to ignore those articles, and I'm afraid others may do the same.
The perfect place for such articles, in my opinion, would be the user blog namespace. It wouldn't even cross my mind to edit another person's blog post, so I'd be happy just reading. Furthermore, it's nice that you can comment on blogs with the forum-like message wall thing instead of talk pages. I'm pretty sure new and anonymous users won't find talk pages accessible, but there are plenty of blog comments from both.
Blog posts are also featured on the main page, so it's guaranteed that people will notice those guides. I'd be happy if people read my posts, I'd know I didn't write it for nothing. Of course, making the main page blog post list more dynamic and alive is also better for the entire wiki, as it attracts more visitors and revisits.
We've also sometimes looked into Wikipedia with our policies, and they do have an official policy about nobody owning the articles. I tend to think that in Wikipedia they know what they're doing.
Blog posts have no length limits or anything like that, they act just like normal articles in that they can be edited and so on. The only significant difference to the main namespace is that the system enforces that only the creator (and admins) can edit the posts (and of course even admins should not edit the posts unless there's some content that's clearly harmful, like racism or such).
I may have forgotten some point, but it looks like I wrote quite a lengthy post already, so I'll just reiterate:
- I see no downsides in posting strategy guides and such into user blogs. I recently posted another kind of guide as a blog post myself as well.
- Claiming ownership of pages in the main namespace feels awkward and against the general idea of wikis.
- Strategy guides are obviously usually personal opinions and it's natural the authors want to claim them. However, where do we draw the line? "List of units in Civilization: Beyond Earth by ZeroOne" would certainly feel wrong, am I right?
- Strategy guides are great content and we need even more of them.
- Blogs are a great way to highlight the author of the content, they also show your avatar in the beginning.
- Blog posts area featured on the main page, profiting both the post and the entire wiki in general.
We could establish an official policy along these lines: "Articles in the main namespace are owned by the community and can be edited by anyone. If you don't want your content to be edited, post it into your blog or into the forum." What does everyone else think?