Forum:Philosophical Ramblings About UN
I was doing some thinking recently, on the collaborative nature of a wiki and humor in general. I believe that the better articles come not as a result of the collaboration of many authors, but as a single vision of one author. This is because of the fact that it provides a singular vision about where the jokes are going. Keeping things unified works better because it keeps the jokes more in line with one another and the reader is not left confused at the end. There is one major exception: articles which are primarily lists. These allow for one liners and coherence is not as paramount; each item in the list is essentially its own joke and is not reliant on other people's input. Anyway, that's my thought on it, what do you all think? --
jsonitsac talk to me crimes against humanity03:20, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
- That is true in a way. What I often see is that a really good article has 4 distinct job positions. The original author of the 'joke', the filler of minor jokes and fluff, the formatter/prettifier (for tables, wikicode, links, templates), and the photoshopper/uploader. Some overlap, some have multiple people, some are all by one person, but often the best articles have 2 to 5 people doing 1 to 3 of those jobs. --Splaka 04:31, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
- Articles also come from riffing on a topic in IRC or whatever. Remember that most comedy is written by teams of writers - and they'll write stuff themselves with others filling in a lot of the time, but sometimes they really just jam on an idea. Then someone polishes it. Etc. Every combination you can think of happens - David Gerard 07:17, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
- Far out Splak...but I think he just confused Blogopedia with Uncyclopedia. – Mahroww a.k.a. Rooney Arith Metise 05:05, 22 March 2006 (UTC)
Interesting point. I think that some articles are more easily parallelized than others, i.e. Sophia. But, for example, God has actually gone up and down since it was released. The original still forms the funniest part, but *some* of the new parts do help. --Chronarion 01:24, 23 March 2006 (UTC)
- Articles need caretakers. I keep an eye on about 50. I'll let them sit for awhile and watch the weed-to-flower ratio, then pull out the weeds. Some of my adopted kids like Linux have had some great additions from others since my rewrite... though it's about due for another weeding. ~ T. (talk) 00:35, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
- I agree wholeheartedly; there are a whole bunch that I watch over, many of which I didn't write originally, and although a lot of people contribute crap, there are definitely some real gems that come out of minor edits. For example, World of Whorecraft consists almost entirely of my content but the initial quote comes from some anonymous IP user and I feel that it makes a far better beginning than anything that I could possibly have come up with. --Sir gwax (talk)
15:07, 24 March 2006 (UTC)
- I agree wholeheartedly; there are a whole bunch that I watch over, many of which I didn't write originally, and although a lot of people contribute crap, there are definitely some real gems that come out of minor edits. For example, World of Whorecraft consists almost entirely of my content but the initial quote comes from some anonymous IP user and I feel that it makes a far better beginning than anything that I could possibly have come up with. --Sir gwax (talk)
