User talk:Ryan
Please keep personal thoughts limited to discussion pages. Thank you!
Wikithings
There are only so many admins on RealCTY, and they were chosen because they were interesting and effective (and therefore busy) people. Empty pages get deleted when I perform intermittent site overhauls and personally inspect and edit every page for formatting and informational accuracy. One is coming up about tomorrow/Friday/Saturday. Also, there are, in fact, pages about editing and administrative policy; they are located at RealCTY:Policy and Help:Editing.
I have never found a reason to make an entire policy namespace. So few people follow policy as it is; we're not Wikipedia, so there can't be such stringent rule enforcement. Extra policy pages would be pointless. Istead, I find it more reasonable just to rely on grammtically inclinded people to do the editing work. We can't do things like simply erase poorly formatted information or ban terrible editors because we're so small. Furthermore, there's no real intent to expand; we're a cult, not a wide open community. I try to keep things as encyclopedic as possible, but I live with what's there.
There are actually already templates on the wiki. Well, actually, just one: it's the one responsible for the changing header on the Main Page at midnight each night. Templates would be nice, but again, given the nonexistent intersection between people who understand formatting and people who have time, this is not easily done. I'll try to put in templates for series of pages or the like as soon as I can.
Although this wasn't your question, I prefer using the Course:, Places: and Site: labels because it makes it easier to do site overhauls from the "Allpages" page.
I don't like wikiformatting for the same reason you don't like HTML here: I find it unwieldly. I suspect more people know HTML, which is taught in the most basic computer education course, than they know wikilanguage, and it seems ridiculous to enforce a policy around wikiformatting when it's already rather nonexistent. Instead, I prefer HTML, and I think it looks better anyway.
More Wikithings
I should actually specify, though, that RealCTY follows pretty much all wikiformatting except what has already been described above. The only difference is that we never delete any information just because it seems to be a personal account, because we want to keep as much info as possible. Reformatting it into the text is preferred, but often difficult.
